Large scale genomic analyses are being performed by numberous multi-national and multi-institutional consortia in a range of tumour streams. It is now possible to mine this rich data for deep insights into cancer and cancer biology. One particular data stream is DNA methylation whereby genome-scale DNA methylation profiling has been performed on a large number of primary tumours from a wide range of tissue streams. The goal of this document is to account for method(s) to extract and explore DNA methylation datasets readily and publicly available to the research community. This document will outline only a small set of resources available and also focus of the utility of R and RStudio for the analysis of DNA methylation in cancer.