Goodreads: Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell

Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites by Matthew A. Russell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars




This short book might have more appropriately been titled, "How I Personally Mined the Social Web using Python."

Without giving too much explanation, the author provides samples of his Python routines. Where another author might spend an entire chapter (if not the whole book) explaining a technological topic, Russell just makes a comment and moves on to his code examples. If you are comfortable with, "Install this, run that command, and now copy my code..." then this is an okay book.

This is basically a Python cookbook with Social Media recipes. It covers APIs useful for Google e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. As such, it was interesting reading to see how it is done, but this is not a primer on how to do it.

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