Mining the Social Web, 3rd 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 to analyze social data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, 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. There is a gradual crescendo in terms of complexity, with some techniques or technologies introduced in early chapters seeing reuse in a later chapter.

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 Jupyter Notebook that is named according to the number of the chapter in this book.

Note

The source code for this book is available on GitHub. You are highly encouraged to take advantage of Docker to build a self-contained virtual machine experience. This will allow you to work through the sample code in a preconfigured development environment that “just works.”