The Practitioner's Guide to Graph Data

Chapter 13. Epilogue

We are incredibly honored that you went with us on this journey to graph thinking and its application to complex problems. You learned a new way of thinking for solving complex problems, a new body of theory to formalize that thinking, and a number of new techniques and technologies for applying that thinking in building practical solutions.

As Leonardo da Vinci said, “A developer would be overcome by sleep and hunger before being able to describe with words what a code sample can express in an instant.”

Like with all crafts, mastery of graph thinking can be gained through continued practice. We set up our notebooks and example problems to show you how to get started with your new craft. Feel free to keep playing with those notebooks and adjusting them to suit your particular problems.

We would like to encourage you to apply the frameworks from this book to the problems that you encounter. The first chapters of this book showed you how to reason about which problems benefit from graph thinking. The criteria we walked through aren’t hard and fast rules but simply rough guidelines for discerning when a problem has the characteristics that make it suitable for graph thinking. Over time, you will build an intuition that will support this decision making.

As you are starting out, it will likely feel more natural and comfortable to think about your data problems through the relational lens of tabular data. Push through the discomfort of adopting a different ...