There are plenty of tutorials for R - just google. I'm sure someone else has written a much better tutorial than I could write.

R is a full blown programming language without a simple to use GUI (at least not in the base package), so if you don't have any programming experience it might be slow going. But the freedom of a programming language makes the learning curve worth it (if you've used SAS, you understand what I mean)

My grad program offers 1 credit course in R to first year grad students, and much of it is available online. When it comes to statistical graphics, the stuff on ggplot2 is particularly relevant, and in the first 2-3 sets of lecture notes.

See also the ggplot2 reference manual