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)...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.  <Sigh> No more flying monkeys. 

If you want to contribute to the project, set up an account on github!  My repos are at 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