Database

• Access
• MySQL
  • MySQL Workbench

Documentation / Training / Sharing

• Screencast-o-matic:  capture screen recordings
• Slideshare:  share presentations, documents and videos

Files / File Manipulation / File Conversion

• Able2Extract  Professional:  PDF to Excel and other formats (free trial)
• csvkit, suite of utilities for converting to and working with CSV
• pdftk, the pdf toolkit, PDF Labs
• Zamzar:  free online file conversion

Graphics/Visualization/Images

• Irvanview:  free image viewer (displays multi-page TIFFs)
• Paint.Net:  free image and photo editing software
• Google Fusion Tables:  filter, summarize, visualize data
• R Color Chart

Internet / Web Tools

• Data Wrangler from Stanford University
• Filezilla for file transfers using FTP (free)
• Firefox Plugins
  • Firebug – used with Ruby Watir for screen scraping
• Google-Refine:  power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it
  • ProPublica’s Dan Nguyen:  Using Google Refine to Clean Messy Data
• Wget for Windows:  retrieve files from web using HTTP and FTP
• WordPress Plugins
  • SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – display computer source code in WordPress
  • WP-Table Reloaded – create and manage tables in WordPress

Linux Tools

• Argonne National Laboratory Public Software Mirror
• X Windows using PuTTY/XMing with SSH
• R, MySQL, FileZilla, wget, cron, diff, gedit, filemanager, awk/bash scripts

Maps / Geocoding / Geographic Information System

• Batchgeo:  create Google maps
• Fast online maps with Google Fusion Tables
• Geocoding Tools for Public Health
• QGIS:  Quantum GIS – Open Source Geographic Information System

Mathematics / Statistics

• Excel:
  • How to Use Excel Filtering to Find Data Fast
  • NodeXL:  Network overview, discovery and exploration for Excel
  • Spreadsheet Addiction:  why spreadsheets can be problems
• R Project for Statistical Computing:  free software environment for statistical computing and graphics
• What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

Programming

• R Project for Statistical Computing:  data manipulation and analysis
  • The R packages in a data scientist’s toolbox, Revolutions
  • R-bloggers:  R news and tutorials
  • R mailing lists archive
• Ruby:  use with RubyGems and Watir plugins for screen scraping
• Delphi:  create interactive Windows programs, connect to databases

Screen Scraping

• ProPublica’s Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data
  • Reading Data from Flash Sites
  • Scraping Data from HTML
  • Turning PDFs to Text
  • Getting Text Out of an Image-Only PDF
• Ruby:
  • Web testing tool used for web scraping:  Watir, RubyGems.  Examples
• Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework.

Utilities

• WinMerge:  Compare two ASCII text files (free)