Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition

Appendix A. Information About This Book’s Virtual Machine Experience

Just as each chapter in this book has a corresponding Jupyter Notebook, each appendix also has a corresponding Jupyter Notebook. All notebooks, regardless of purpose, are maintained in the book’s GitHub source code repository. The particular appendix that you are reading here “in print” serves as a special cross-reference to the Jupyter Notebook that provides step-by-step instructions for how to install and configure the book’s virtual machine, facilitated using Docker.

You are strongly encouraged to use the book’s associated Docker image as a development environment instead of using any existing Python installation you may have on your computer. There are some nontrivial configuration management issues involved in installing the Jupyter Notebook and all of its dependencies for scientific computing. The various other third-party Python packages that are used throughout the book and the need to support users across multiple platforms only exacerbate the complexity that can be involved in getting a basic development environment up and running.

The GitHub repository contains the most up-to-date instructions for getting started, including how to install Docker and launch a “containerized” image of all the software used in this book. Even if you are an expert in working with Python developer tools, you will still likely save some time by taking advantage of the book’s virtual machine experience on your first pass ...