No matter what your domain of interest or expertise, the internet is a treasure trove of useful data that comes in many shapes, forms, and sizes, from beautifully documented fast APIs to data that need to be scraped from deep inside of 1990s html pages. In this 3 hour tutorial you will learn how to programmatically read in various types of web data from experts in the field (Founders of the rOpenSci project and the training lead of RStudio). By the end of the tutorial you will have a basic idea of how to wrap an R package around a standard API, extract common non-standard data formats, and scrape data into tidy data frames from web pages.
The World Bank makes available a ton of great data from the World Development Indicators through its web API. The WDI package for R makes it easy to search and download data series from the WDI.