R Tools for the Data Science Toolkit Project + Hack Night

Fellow R Users,

We're trying something different this month. I am going to talk about the basics of accessing external data sources (through a specific API) and several handy R functions (existing functions or new ones created by me). The discussion will also cover a bit about revision control with github, i.e. the 'social coding' website.

The package that I am creating is an R wrapper for the Data Science Toolkit API (www.datasciencetoolkit.org (http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/))...it's in an extremely preliminary stage at the moment and likely will be incomplete at the time of the meeting. This is where the rest of the group comes in -- we'll spend the remaining time either in the room or at the bar contributing to this project. The first person to contribute a function to the RDSTK project will get a prize....likely a sticker, or 100 stickers, courtesy of Revolution R. No more flying monkeys.

If you want to contribute to the project, set up an account on github! My repos are at http://www.github.com/rtelmore and I'll put the RDSTK project up there soon. You can be an active contributor or just a casual follower. This is a lead-in to a future meeting, where we will learn to create R packages. We will briefly discuss making a package in this meeting as well.

See you in May!

Ryan