Mining the Social Web, 2nd Edition

Part I. A Guided Tour of the Social Web

Part I of this book is called “a guided tour of the social web” because it presents some practical skills for getting immediate value from some of the most popular social websites. You’ll learn how to access APIs and analyze social data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, web pages, blogs and feeds, emails, and GitHub accounts. In general, each chapter stands alone and tells its own story, but the flow of chapters throughout Part I is designed to also tell a broader story. It gradually crescendos in terms of the complexity of the subject matter before resolving with a light-hearted discussion about some aspects of the semantic web that are relevant to the current social web landscape.

Because of this gradual increase in complexity, you are encouraged to read each chapter in turn, but you also should be able to cherry-pick chapters and follow along with the examples should you choose to do so. Each chapter’s sample code is consolidated into a single IPython Notebook that is named according to the number of the chapter in this book.

Note

The source code for this book is available at GitHub. You are highly encouraged to take advantage of the virtual machine experience so that you can work through the sample code in a pre-configured development environment that “just works.”