Requirements

For this chapter, you will need a computer with access to the internet. You will also need to have R installed and the following packages installed and then loaded:

install.packages("XML") 
install.packages("ggplot2") 
install.packages("plyr") 
install.packages("reshape2") 
install.packages("zoo") 
 
library(XML) 
library(ggplot2 ,quietly=TRUE) 
library(plyr ,quietly=TRUE) 
library(reshape2 ,quietly=TRUE) 
library(zoo ,quietly=TRUE) 

The XML package will assist us with acquiring data from the internet, ggplot2 will let us create beautiful graphs and visualizations from our data, plyr and reshape2 will help us with summarizing our data, and the zoo package will allow us to calculate moving averages.

You will also want to set a working directory where some of the charts that we generate will be saved:

setwd("path/where/you/want/to save/charts")