25Mar 2020 by Andrew Treadway
Python for Web Scraping and APIs Online Course

Python for Web Scraping and APIs Online Course

Python, Web Scraping
I recently worked with a great team at 365 Data Science to create an extensive online Python for Web Scraping and APIs course! The course is now available on Udemy. Check it out here! The course covers many important topics, including the following: All about APIs: Get and Post requests HTML syntax - what's it for and why is it useful for web scraping BeautifulSoup - scraping links, text, and other elements from a webpage How to easily scrape tables from webpages How to automatically download files from the web Handling modern challenges: how to scrape JavaScript-rendered webpages Exploring the requests-html package, a powerful alternative to BeautifulSoup Click here to learn more about Python for Web Scraping and APIs Fundamentals! For other resources on learning Python or R, also check…
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24Mar 2020 by Andrew Treadway
What to study if you’re under quarantine

What to study if you’re under quarantine

Python, R
If you're staying indoors more often recently because of the current COVID-19 outbreak and looking for new things to study, here's a few ideas! Free 365 Data Science Courses 365 Data Science is making all of their courses free until April 15. They have a variety of courses across R, Python, SQL, and more. Their platform also has courses that give a great mathematical foundation behind machine learning, which helps you a lot as you get deeper into data science. They also have courses on deep learning, which is a hot field right now. In addition to pure data science, 365 Data Science also covers material on Git / Github, which is essential for any data scientist nowadways. Another nice feature of 365 Data Science is that they also offer…
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17Mar 2020 by Andrew Treadway
How to create decorators in R

How to create decorators in R

Python, R
Introduction One of the coolest features of Python is its nice ability to create decorators. In short, decorators allow us to modify how a function behaves without changing the function's source code. This can often make code cleaner and easier to modify. For instance, decorators are also really useful if you have a collection of functions where each function has similar repeating code. Fortunately, decorators can now also be created in R! The first example below is in Python - we'll get to R in a moment. If you already know about decorators in Python, feel free to skip below to the R section. Below we have a function that prints today's date. In our example, we create two functions. The first - print_start_end takes another function as input. It…
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12Mar 2020 by Andrew Treadway
Reading from databases with Python

Reading from databases with Python

Pandas, Python
Background - Reading from Databases with Python This post will talk about several packages for working with databases using Python. We'll start by covering pyodbc, which is one of the more standard packages used for working with databases, but we'll also cover a very useful module called turbodbc, which allows you to run SQL queries efficiently (and generally faster) within Python. pyodbc pyodbc can be installed using pip: [code] pip install pyodbc [/code] Let's start by writing a simple SQL query using pyodbc. To do that, we first need to connect to a specific database. In the examples laid out here, we will be using a SQLite database on my machine. However, you can do this with many other database systems, as well, such as SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.…
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