Book Image

R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By : Olgun Aydin
Book Image

R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By: Olgun Aydin

Overview of this book

Web scraping is a technique to extract data from websites. It simulates the behavior of a website user to turn the website itself into a web service to retrieve or introduce new data. This book gives you all you need to get started with scraping web pages using R programming. You will learn about the rules of RegEx and Xpath, key components for scraping website data. We will show you web scraping techniques, methodologies, and frameworks. With this book's guidance, you will become comfortable with the tools to write and test RegEx and XPath rules. We will focus on examples of dynamic websites for scraping data and how to implement the techniques learned. You will learn how to collect URLs and then create XPath rules for your first web scraping script using rvest library. From the data you collect, you will be able to calculate the statistics and create R plots to visualize them. Finally, you will discover how to use Selenium drivers with R for more sophisticated scraping. You will create AWS instances and use R to connect a PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS. By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently confident to create end-to-end web scraping systems using R.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Cloud engine models

The service-oriented architect evaluates everything as a service (EaaS, XaaS or AAS). Cloud computing providers offer services in various formats: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). In the following part, we are going to talk about those formats.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

IaaS includes online services designed to respond to various low-level details of network infrastructure, such as physical computing resources, location, data segmentation, scaling, security, backup, and top-level APIs.

Linux containers work in isolated sections of a single Linux kernel running directly on physical hardware. Linux groups and namespaces are used to...