Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition

Prelude

Although it’s been mentioned in the preface and will continue to be casually reiterated in every chapter at some point, this isn’t your typical tech book with an archive of sample code that accompanies the text. It’s a book that attempts to rock the status quo and define a new standard for tech books in which the code is managed as a first-class, open source software project, with the book being a form of “premium” support for that code base.

To address that objective, serious thought has been put into synthesizing the discussion in the book with the code examples into as seamless a learning experience as possible. After much discussion with readers of the first edition and reflection on lessons learned, it became apparent that an interactive user interface backed by a server running on a virtual machine and rooted in solid configuration management was the best path forward. There is not a simpler and better way to give you total control of the code while also ensuring that the code will “just work”—regardless of whether you use macOS, Windows, or Linux; whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit machine; and whether third-party software dependencies change APIs and break.

For the book’s third edition, the power of Docker was leveraged for the virtual machine experience. Docker is a technology that can be installed on the most common computer operating systems and is used to create and manage “containers.” Docker containers act much like virtual machines, creating self-contained ...