Web-Scraping: the Basics by Rolf Fredheim.
From the post:
Slides from the first session of my course about web scraping through R: Web scraping for the humanities and social sciences
Includes an introduction to the paste function, working with URLs, functions and loops.
Putting it all together we fetch data in JSON format about Wikipedia page views from http://stats.grok.se/
Solutions here:
Download the .Rpres file to use in Rstudio here
Hard to say how soon but eventually data in machine readable formats is going to be the default and web scraping will be a historical footnote.
But it hasn’t happened yet so pass this on to newbies who need advice.