Chapter 5. Let's Build Software with GitHub

GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service and it offers distributed revision control, source code management functionality of Git, and much more. GitHub supports both private and public repositories. There are a vast number of public projects in GitHub to which contributions come from multiple people around the world. GitHub provides an API to access their data; the public data can be accessed by anyone whereas the private data can be accessed only by authorized users.

In this chapter, we will see how to access the public data of GitHub using its API from R, and we will see how to perform Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and mine significant patterns from the GitHub data extracted by us. As a part of this chapter, we will cover different methods to extract the data from GitHub and various graphical and non-graphical EDA techniques.

The objectives of this chapter are to show how to extract the public data from GitHub and...