Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series

Photo by Nico Cavallotto on Flickr

Update, January 2012: Everything…yes, everything, is superseded by my free online book, The Bastards Book of Ruby, which is a much more complete walkthrough of basic programming principles with far more practical and up-to-date examples and projects than what you’ll find here.

I’m only keeping this old walkthrough up as a historical reference. I’m sure the code is so ugly that I’m not going to even try re-reading it.

So check it out: The Bastards Book of Ruby

-Dan

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Update, Dec. 30, 2010: I published a series of data collection and cleaning guides for ProPublica, to describe what I did for our Dollars for Docs project. There is a guide for Pfizer which supersedes the one I originally posted here.

So a little while ago, I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites. A “little while” turned out to be more than a month-and-a-half. I actually wrote most of it in a week and then forgot about. The timeliness of the fourth lesson, which shows how to help Pfizer in its mission to more transparent, compelled me to just publish them in incomplete form. There’s probably inconsistencies in the writing and some of the code examples, but the final code sections at the end of each tutorial do seem to execute as expected.

As the tutorials are aimed at people who aren’t experienced programming, the code is pretty verbose, pedantic, and in some cases, a little inefficient. It was my attempt to think how to make the code most readable, and I’m very welcome to editing changes.

DISCLAIMER: The code, data files, and results are meant for reference and example only. You use it at your own risk.

Tutorial 1: Go from knowing nothing to scraping Web pages. In an hour. Hopefully – A massive, sprawling tutorial that attempts to take you from learning what HTML is, to the definition of an “if loop statement”, and finally, to using a Ruby library to scrape some information from Wikipedia. It may be too confusing for total neophytes and laughably basic for self-taught programmers. But at least you can kind of see, from beginning to end, one roadmap on going from nothing to something in the programming world.

Tutorial 2: Scraping a County Jail Website to Find Out Who’s in Jail – This uses all the concepts from the first tutorial and applies them to something that a cops reporter might actually want to try out.

Tutorial 3: Who’s Been in Jail Before: Cross-checking the jail logs with the court system with Ruby’s Mechanize – This lesson introduces you to another Ruby library that allows you to automate the filling-out of forms so that you can access online databases, in this case, California criminal case histories to see if current inmates are repeat-alleged-offenders.

Tutorial 4: Improving Pfizer’s Dollars-to-Doctors Pay List – Last week, Pfizer released a list of nearly 5,000 doctors and medical institutions that it made $35 million in consulting and expense payments. Fun. Unfortunately, the list, as it initially existed online, is just about useless to anyone wanting to examine trends. This tutorial provides a script to make the list more interesting to journalists.