I think there are lots of good R libraries for getting data from various places: DBI (databases), haven (SPSS, Stata, SAS), readxl (xls & xlsx), httr (web apis)

I think there are lots of good R libraries for getting data from various places: DBI (databases), haven (SPSS, Stata, SAS), readxl (xls & xlsx), httr (web apis), readr/data.table (flat files). (Disclaimer: I wrote/contributed to a lot of those). I think tidyr also currently has the edge over pandas for making [tidy data](http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html).