Summary

We have covered quite a bit in this chapter to get us started with both R and Python but our work will pay off as we move along with subsequent chapters. We went through two exercises to scrape data from GitHub using both R and Python. As can be seen, both tools have popular packages that allow for easy scraping of data. Both approaches were described in detail to allow you to find which process works better for you. Python is more generally known as a web scraping software tool; however, R has similar capabilities for similar tasks. Both approaches were presented to offer you more tools to keep in your toolbox. These are not the only packages that either programming language has to offer to allow for web scraping, but they are some of the more popular ones. Further investigation will show many other scraping packages such as scrapy for Python.

In the next chapter, we will begin our BI development with Microsoft Excel and PowerBI.