Toolbox: Data Science Toolkit

If you spend a lot of time researching things on the Internet as part of your reporting, the online Data Science Toolkit and a book by Pete Warden could make parts of your job a lot easier.

It is especially handy with geographic data. When online, you can put in an address and get back a pair of latitude/longitude coordinates. Or you can put in a pair of coordinates and get back the Congressional district or county that point lies in.

Those tools are just two of many online, and those are a subset of tools explained in Warden's book, Data Source Handbook (O'Reilly, 2011). 

The volume can also serve as a cookbook for those doing database reporting.