Chapter 1.  Social Media, Social Data, and Python

This book is about applying data mining techniques to social media using Python. The three highlighted keywords in the previous sentence help us define the intended audience of this book: any developer, engineer, analyst, researcher, or student who is interested in exploring the area where the three topics meet.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Social media and social data
  • The overall process of data mining from social media
  • Setting up the Python development environment
  • Python tools for data science
  • Processing data in Python

Getting started

In the second quarter of 2015, Facebook reported nearly 1.5 billion monthly active users. In 2013, Twitter had reported a volume of 500+ million ...

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