1 Introduction

This is a brief tutorial covering what an API is, in the context of accessing data, and how to use R to access and plot data from the World Bank data API.

It’s designed for people who want to

  1. learn what an API is, and may have to use other (non-World Bank) APIs
  2. learn how to access the World Bank API in R

If you just want to focus on the second, you can probably skip ahead to chapter 3.

At a guess, it may take about half a day to work through this material.