Building a basic scripting toolkit

Generally tools can be divided into two categories:

  • Tools that get information from the web
  • Tools that parse the information you getting

A script brings together tools to do one or more of those things.

Python

  • A common and multi-purpose programming language.
  • Relatively beginner friendly and well documented.
  • There are many tutorials for both web scraping and accessing APIs using Python libraries and frameworks.
  • requests and BeautifulSoup are common Python libraries for getting and working with html

R

  • A common programming language particularly strong at data science tasks.
  • Large community with robust documentation.
  • rvest is a popular package for scraping data from the web.

A note about environment setup

Jupyter Notebooks

  • Jupyter Notebooks are hosted computational environments.
  • Minimal environment setup required, Jupyter handles that for you.
To use a basic Python environment in a Jupyter notebook for free go here:
https://jupyter.org/try
and select
"Try Classic Notebook".