Automated Data Collection with R: A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining

by Simon Munzert, Christian Rubba, Peter Meiner

A hands on guide to web scraping and text mining for both beginners and experienced users of RIntroduces fundamental concepts of the main architecture of the web and databases and covers HTTP, HTML, XML, JSON, SQL. Provides basic techniques to query web documents and data sets (XPath and regular expressions). An extensive set of exercises are presented to guide the reader through each technique. Explores both supervised and unsupervised techniques as well as advanced techniques such as data scraping and text management. Case studies are featured throughout along with examples for each technique presented. R code and solutions to exercises featured in the book are provided on a supporting website.

480 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 17, 2014

Reviews

[Lord_Humungus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book about web scraping.
There were a couple of chapters I didn't read because I wasn't interested (I dont need text mining, for example).
Some links and methods are broken or outdated, but I suppose that's normal in a software book.
I considered I went from being a low-level amateur in R to being that plus a low-level amateur in scraping that knows the basics and can progress from there when it's needed.