Tag Archives: programming

Analyzing the U.S. Senate Smiles: A Ruby tutorial with the Face.com and NYT Congress APIs

January 24, 2012

Who’s got the biggest smile among our U.S. senators? Let’s find out and exercise our Ruby coding and civic skills. This article consists of a quick coding strategy overview (from the full code is at my Github). Or jump here… Continue reading →

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The Bastards Book: A Programming Tutorial for journalists, researchers, analysts, and anyone else who cares about data

December 7, 2011

Back when I wrote my “Coding for Journalists 101″ guide about a year and a half ago, I barely realized how useful code could be as a journalistic tool. Since then, after the Dollars for Docs project at ProPublica and… Continue reading →

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dataist blog: An inspiring case for journalists learning to code

February 16, 2011

About a year ago I threw up a long, rambling guide hoping to teach non-programming journalists some practical code. Looking back at it, it seems inadequate. Actually, I misspoke, I haven’t looked back at it because I’m sure I’ll just… Continue reading →

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Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series

April 6, 2010

Update, January 2012: Everything…yes, everything, is superseded by my free online book, The Bastards Book of Ruby, which is a much more complete walkthrough of basic programming principles with far more practical and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… Continue reading →

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Coding for Journalists 103: Who’s been in jail before: Cross-checking the jail log with the court system; Use Ruby’s mechanize to fill out a form

April 6, 2010

This is part of a four-part series on web-scraping for journalists. As of Apr. 5, 2010, it was a published a bit incomplete because I wanted to post a timely solution to the recent Pfizer doctor payments list release, but… Continue reading →

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Coding for Journalists 102: Who’s in Jail Now: Collecting info from a county jail site

April 6, 2010

This is part 2 of a 4-part series in introductory coding for journalists. Go here for the first lesson. This lesson and code will still be verbose, but will have a lot less hand-holding than the previous one.

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Coding for Journalists 101: Go from knowing nothing to scraping Web pages. In an hour. Hopefully.

April 6, 2010

UPDATE (12/1/2011): Ever since writing this guide, I’ve wanted to put together a site that is focused both on teaching the basics of programming and showing examples of practical code. I finally got around to making it: The Bastards Book… Continue reading →

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