I decided to pull the NY Times Bestseller list for Hardcover Fiction. After reviewing the information on the Times API site, I applied for an API Key for my API of interest. I put the rest of the specifics right in the URI.

Using the jsonlite package makes pulling the information nice and easy. I had some trouble at first because I was accidentally using RJSONIO.

library(jsonlite)
## 
## Attaching package: 'jsonlite'
## 
## The following object is masked from 'package:utils':
## 
##     View
library(RCurl)
## Loading required package: bitops
feed_url <- "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/books/v3/lists/hardcover-Fiction.json?&"
key <- "api-key=d1974bfb220be7dbc003045f60544bfe:19:73353118"
pull <- fromJSON(paste0(feed_url, key))

I selected the specific columns of interest and then created the data frame

summary <- cbind(pull$results$books$title, pull$results$books$author, pull$results$books$rank, pull$results$books$weeks_on_list)


df <- data.frame(summary, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

The only thing left to do was some minor cleanup work

colnames(df) <- c("Title", "Author", "Rank", "Weeks on List")


df$Rank <- as.integer(df$Rank)
df$`Weeks on List` <- as.integer(df$`Weeks on List`)
df
##                             Title                          Author Rank
## 1                    ROGUE LAWYER                    John Grisham    1
## 2                          SEE ME                 Nicholas Sparks    2
## 3                  CAREER OF EVIL                Robert Galbraith    3
## 4           WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE  Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor    4
## 5                    THE SURVIVOR      Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills    5
## 6                  THE LAKE HOUSE                     Kate Morton    6
## 7                THE MURDER HOUSE James Patterson and David Ellis    7
## 8     ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE                   Anthony Doerr    8
## 9    THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB               David Lagercrantz    9
## 10 A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS               George R R Martin   10
## 11              GO SET A WATCHMAN                      Harper Lee   11
## 12          THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN                   Paula Hawkins   12
## 13                   CITY ON FIRE             Garth Risk Hallberg   13
## 14                        MAKE ME                       Lee Child   14
## 15                      AFTER YOU                      Jojo Moyes   15
## 16                THE NIGHTINGALE                  Kristin Hannah   16
## 17        COME RAIN OR COME SHINE                       Jan Karon   17
## 18            THE EXPLORERS GUILD     Kevin Costner and Jon Baird   18
## 19                FOREIGN AFFAIRS                    Stuart Woods   19
## 20               FATES AND FURIES                    Lauren Groff   20
##    Weeks on List
## 1              1
## 2              2
## 3              1
## 4              1
## 5              3
## 6              1
## 7              4
## 8             77
## 9              8
## 10             3
## 11            15
## 12            41
## 13             2
## 14             7
## 15             4
## 16            38
## 17             0
## 18             0
## 19             0
## 20             0