Credit rating by country

The financial crisis has put a lot of pressure on countries' long-term foreign currency credit ratings, with France recently being downgraded by S&P. Wikipedia provides a list of countries by credit ratings as report by US rating agencies S&P, Fitch, Moody's and Dagong, a Chinese rating agency.

So, what does the world look like today through the eyes of those rating agencies?

I use the R packages XML and googleVis to read and display the data from Wikipedia with just a few lines.
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R related books: Traditional vs online publishing

How many R related books have been published so far? Who is the most popular publisher? How many other manuals, tutorials and books have been published online? Let's find out.

A few years ago I used the publication list on r-project.org as an argument with the IT department that R is an established statistical programming language and that they should allow me to install it on my PC. I believe at the time there were about 20 R related books available.

A recent post on Recology pointed me to a talk given by Ed Goodwin at the Houston R user group meeting about regular expressions in R, something I always wanted to learn properly, but never got around to do.

So let's see, if we can manage to extract the information of published R books and texts from r-project.org, with what we learned from Ed about regular expressions in R.
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