We will go through a series of lessons in this chapter that will teach us the programming essentials to load, manipulate, and analyze different kinds of data. This will pave the way for the next few chapters on more advanced visualization techniques and tools. It is highly recommended that you try out and play with the code provided in the support section of the book's web page to understand the underlying concepts introduced in this chapter. Mathematica is a rich programming language that provides many functions to achieve miscellaneous tasks. We will only focus on the concepts and functions that are useful for our purpose. These lessons can be considered as a crash course on data manipulation and basic visualization using Mathematica, so buckle up and enjoy the ride!