Intermediate Importing Data in R

Many companies store their information in relational databases. The R community has also developed R packages to get data from these architectures. You'll learn how to connect to a database and how to retrieve data from it.

Importing an entire table from a database while you might only need a tiny bit of information seems like a lot of unncessary work. In this chapter, you'll learn about SQL queries, which will help you make things more efficient by performing some computations on the database side.

More and more of the information that data scientists are using resides on the web. Importing this data into R requires an understanding of the protocols used on the web. In this chapter, you'll get a crash course in HTTP and learn to perform your own HTTP requests from inside R.

Importing data from the web is one thing; actually being able to extract useful information is another. Learn more about the JSON format to get one step closer to web domination.

Next to R, there are also other commonly used statistical software packages: SAS, STATA and SPSS. Each of them has their own file format. Learn how to use the haven and foreign packages to get them into R with remarkable ease!