Olgun Aydin - R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide: Techniques and tools to crawl and scrape data from websites

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Olgun Aydin is a PhD candidate at the Department of Statistics at Mimar Sinan University, and is studying deep learning for his thesis. He also works as a data scientist.

Olgun is familiar with big data technologies, such as Hadoop and Spark, and is a very big fan of R. He has already published academic papers about the application of statistics, machine learning, and deep learning.

He loves statistics, and loves to investigate new methods and share his experience with other people.

Ezgi Nazman is a Research Assistant in Gazi University, Statistics where she has been studying for a PhD since 2015. She did her bachelor's degree at Ege University, Statistics in 2012. She was Erasmus student in University of Hradec Kralove, Informatics and Management between September 2011 - June 2012. From 2013-2015, she studied Master of Science in Statistics, Gazi University.

Her research interests lie in the area of statistics, data mining, and machine learning, ranging from theory to implementation. She has had five articles published on SCI and other international indexes, and eight presented papers in international conferences. She is one of the authors of a book titled Arastirmacilar icin SPSS Uygulamali Deney Tasarimi.

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This book is for R programmers looking to quickly get started with web scraping. Some fundamental knowledge of R is required. This book will give you a quick, hands-on introduction to web scraping and how to use popular R libraries, such as rvest and RSelenium. Right from the initial environment setup to quickly scraping HTML web pages for useful information, this book will cover only the absolute fundamentals of web scraping without going into too much depth. By the end of the book, you will have the understanding that's necessary for scraping any web page using R programming.

This book is for R programmers looking to quickly get started with web scraping, as well as data analysts who want to learn about scraping using R. Some fundamental knowledge of R is all that is required to get started with this book.

, Introduction to Web Scraping , introduces web scraping techniques, which are getting more and more popular, since data is as valuable as oil in the 21st century. In this chapter, you can find detailed information about web scraping technologies. We also take an overview of some of the key languages for web scraping, such as XPath and regEX . We'll also look into some web scraping libraries for R, such as rvest and RSelenium technologies .

, Working with the XML Path Language and the Regular Expression Language , looks at XPath and regEX rules, which are quite important to know when scraping a web page. In this chapter, you can find useful information about these languages and also have a chance to write XPath and regEX rules from scratch.

, Web Scraping with rvest , covers the rvest library. Scraping a web page with R is straightforward thanks to the rvest library, which was developed by Hadley Wickham. In this chapter, you can find tips and tricks about the library and learn how to write an R script by using the rvest library to scrape a web page from scratch.