Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell, O'Reilly

 February 28, 2012

Mining the Social Web is a good start for anyone is going to create scripts to analyze patterns in Social Networks. I’ve to say that this book consider that the reader already masters Python. I think that should be written directly on the title (ie: “Mining the Social Web with Python”).

I liked the really fast approach to the Social Networks, even if a lot of times I wanted more; for this reason I consider it only a start, not a complete book.

The part I really enjoyed was the one about the HTML5 microformats. This is the only book that cover the topic from the data mining point of view, as far as I’ve seen.

I had the pleasure to read this book in the e-book version, and I’ve to admit that O’Reilly did a really good job in linking the different parts of the book through hyperlinks.

The biggest part of the book is focused more on what text is important rather that why it is important. In the book is touched the why speaking about the Semantic Web processing, but this is beyond the goal of this book, I suppose.

I would recommend this book only to those people who are willing to have a starting point on the web mining or who is trying to understand if the topic is interesting for him/her.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O’Reilly Blogger Program