Mining the Social Web (2nd Edition) by Matthew A Russell

This is a book for a relatively small niche. Most users of the social web (Twitter, Facebook, etc) won’t have the programming expertise to follow the technical details and most programmers won’t be interested in the data which come from the social web. I’m still on the fringes of target audience set, with a long history of involvement in the social web and a decent grasp of Python. I have also recently been wanting to learn how to programmatically extract some data from Twitter; not full-scale mining but certainly a desire to dig below the surface.

I haven’t tried and tested every snippet of information in the book. However, for the material where I did dig deeper (Twitter) it provided the keys I needed to unlock some of the barriers that had previously obstructed me. It is worth skimming through the whole book to soak in the wider concepts but, if you are interested in one or more of the social web gateways discussed and want to start exploring it programmatically, it gets both thumbs up.