Tools

Data Science Tools

Hadley Wickham Anything that this guy has made. Over the past 10 years, he's made a bunch of tools that have made R a much less clunky language.
- ggplot2 The best plotting.
- ggvis An upcoming alternative to ggplot2; offers some nice features at the moment for web displays (including interactivity).
- dplyr An incredibly useful data.frame manipulation package. Supports all sorts of things like aggregation, grouping, and even lets you lazily evaluate manipulations of connections to SQL databases (or BQ!)
- tidyr For making your data tidy. An extension of reshape2.
- httr Simple manipulation of HTTP.
- rvest Simple web scraping.
bigrquery A decent interface to BigQuery.
magrittr Understand this as soon as possible. It will make your life much easier.
pipeR A competing version of the magrittr package. Do the tutorial.
rlist Like dplyr but for lists.
data.table Offers an alternative to data.frames, is very fast and incorporates some of the features of dplyr in its DF manipulation syntax. Do the tutorial.
purrr Functional programming additions for R. Lets you do a lot of useful function composition/application easily.
sparkTable Makes Tufte-style spark-* charts or tables. Compatible with shiny.
ShinyJS Great for incorporating interactive javascript into Shiny apps and markdowns via R code.

caret Functional and easy package for prototyping and comparing different machine learning models. Streamlines, pre-processing, cross-validation, hyper-parameter tuning etc with minimal code

jupyter notebooks Interactive workbooks
PyCharm Python IDE with integrated terminal and neat features such as smart autocomplete and SQL database interfaces

matplotlib Most commonly used library for data visualization and plotting
seaborn For creating 'prettier' data visualizations
scikit-learn Commonly used machine learning library
psycopg PostgreSQL adapter for Python. Easy to use and reliable
nltk Extensive library for doing natural language processing (NLP). However to take advantage of different corpora they need to be downloaded separately using nltk.download()
itertools Extremely useful library for faster/efficient looping in Python. Not the easiest to use but read this and give it a shot

[Data Bricks powered by Spark] (https://databricks.com/try-databricks)
- Free Community Edition that lets you spin up a small Spark cluster from any browser!

GeoNames REST API that returns ZIP Codes, and other properties, from Lat/Lon points
Data Science Toolkit Variety of tools including Street Address to Coordinates, Coordinates to Political Areas, Coordinates to Statistics, and several Text parsing/sentiment tools.
FCC Census Block Conversions API for getting the census tract from a Lat/Lon
SoQL Socrata, which hosts SF Open Data, has API access for every data set and a variety of SQL-like functions that make queries powerful
CitySDK The Census Bureau has a SDK package and API. You'll have to sign up for a key, but it's free.