Hacks 24–29: Introduction
On most sports web sites, it’s easier to get statistics on the current season than on past seasons. However, if you want your own stats database for analysis, the opposite is true. I don’t know of any web site that regularly publishes a database of information on the season so far. However, I do know of a lot of web sites that publish data on individual players, games, and teams.
This chapter shows you a few simple ways to collect data on individual games, players, and teams from the current season and to put this data into a single database. You can use this data to look at a player or team’s performance, to manage your fantasy team, or even to run your own fantasy server.
The hacks in this chapter explain where to find data (and how to find new places to get data), how to spider web sites to get data, and how to turn that data into a format you can use. These hacks are probably the most technical and programming-intensive hacks in the book.
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