Interesting, I'm going to look into this after work. I wonder if it teaches statistical theory and R or just the mechanics of R. Because the later would be much more useful.
The more I use R the less I use of base and mostly use the Hadley Wickham Universe of dplyr, tidyr, ggplot/ggvis etc.. This teaches mostly base and not the functional programming parts (Boy do I HATE loops and R base has a great list system that people seem to ignore)
[1] http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/11/24/rvest-easy-web-scraping-w...
[0] http://adolfoalvarez.cl/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-hadleyv...
The paper's examples might be slightly dated as they use dplyr's predecessor, plyr. I imagine they're pretty similar though.