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Mining The Social Web: Analyzing Data From Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, And Other Social Media Sites (2011)

by Matthew A. Russell(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1449388345 (ISBN13: 9781449388348)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

O'Reilly Media

review 1: I was given a free e-book and asked by O'Reilly to review it in exchange. I was excited for the opportunity since I think that having the ability to mine the social web is important. I was also happy that the author utilized Python as the programming language of choice to show how this is to be done. I have been using Python as a tool now for about a year and have found it to be my preferred server side scripting language for web app development. If you are a php, perl, ruby or java developer, I think you could pretty easily transfer the techniques shown across to your choice platform.The book is not focused on Python development per-se, but I think a certain amount of knowledge of that language is helpful to understanding the book. One interesting benefit is the appendix,... more where the author walks you through the use of IPython Notebooks as a way to show example code and execute it. A virtual machine is setup and then run on a port for you to execute live code in a browser.After getting setup, getting to the heart of the matter, the author does a good job of covering the main aspects of mining the more notable social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Introductions to all the api's and example code showing how to access the data on those sites are well written and explained.The book is an excellent cookbook and a must have for the technically minded. However, a shortcoming may be that it does not cover much in the way of theory or objectives of data mining and analysis. While this is an excellent book of how-to, the why of social media mining is left to other sources.
review 2: This short book might have more appropriately been titled, "How I Personally Mined the Social Web using Python." Without giving too much explanation, the author provides samples of his Python routines. Where another author might spend an entire chapter (if not the whole book) explaining a technological topic, Russell just makes a comment and moves on to his code examples. If you are comfortable with, "Install this, run that command, and now copy my code..." then this is an okay book. This is basically a Python cookbook with Social Media recipes. It covers APIs useful for Google e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. As such, it was interesting reading to see how it is done, but this is not a primer on how to do it. less

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