Interesting data sets are the fuel of a good data science project. And while websites like Kaggle offer free data sets, APIs are another very common way to access and acquire interesting data.
Instead of having to download a data set, an Application Programming Interface (API) allows programmers to request data directly from certain websites. Many large websites like Twitter and Facebook offer APIs so that data scientists can access interesting data.
In this workshop, we’re going to create an API using R with the plumber package. Next to this, you will learn how to call the API and how to document it. You don’t need any API experience, but you will need to be familiar with the fundamentals of R to follow along.
If you’re not confident in your R abilities yet, you can check out my workshop getting started with R