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Mining the Social Web

IPython Notebook

The Mining the Social Web Virtual Machine

You may enjoy this short screencast that demonstrates the step-by-step instructions involved in installing the book's virtual machine.

The code for Mining the Social Web is organized by chapter in an IPython Notebook format to maximize enjoyment of following along with examples as part of an interactive experience. Unfortunately, some of the Python dependencies for the example code can be a little bit tricky to get installed and configured, so providing a completely turn-key virtual machine to make your reading experience as simple and enjoyable as possible is in order. Even if you are a seasoned developer, you may still find some value in using this virtual machine to get started and save yourself some time. The virtual machine is powered with Vagrant, an amazing development tool that you'll probably want to know about and arguably makes working with virtualization even easier than a native Virtualbox or VMWare image.

Quick Start Guide

The recommended way of getting started with the example code is by taking advantage of the Vagrant-powered virtual machine as illusrated in this short screencast. After all, you're more interested in following along and learning from the examples than installing and managing all of the system dependencies just to get to that point, right?

[Appendix A - Virtual Machine Experience](https://rawgithub.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition/master/ipynb/html/_Appendix A - Virtual Machine Experience.html) provides clear step-by-step instructions for installing the virtual machine and is intended to serve as a quick start guide.

The Mining the Social Web Wiki

This project takes advantage of its GitHub repository's wiki to act as a point of collaboration for consumers of the source code. Feel free to use the wiki however you'd like to share your experiences, and create additional pages as needed to curate additional information.

One of the more important wiki pages that you may want to bookmark is the Advisories page, which is an archive of notes about particularly disruptive commits or other changes that may affect you.

Another page of interest is a listing of all 100+ numbered examples from the book that conveniently hyperlink to read-only version of the IPython Notebooks

"Premium Support"

The source code in this repository is free for your use however you'd like. If you'd like to complete a more rigorous study about social web mining much like you would experience by following along with a textbook in a classroom, however, you should consider picking up a copy of Mining the Social Web and follow along. Think of the book as offering a form of "premium support" for this open source project.

The publisher's description of the book follows for your convenience:

How can you tap into the wealth of social web data to discover who’s making connections with whom, what they’re talking about, and where they’re located? With this expanded and thoroughly revised edition, you’ll learn how to acquire, analyze, and summarize data from all corners of the social web including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, GitHub, email, websites, and blogs.

  • Employ IPython Notebook, the Natural Language Toolkit, NetworkX, and other scientific computing tools to mine popular social web sites
  • Apply advanced text-mining techniques, such as clustering and TF-IDF, to extract meaning from human language data
  • Bootstrap interest graphs from GitHub by discovering affinities among people, programming languages, and coding projects
  • Build interactive visualizations with D3.js, a state-of-the-art HTML5 and JavaScript toolkit
  • Take advantage of more than two-dozen Twitter recipes presented in O’Reilly’s popular and well-known cookbook format

The example code for this data science book is maintained in a public GitHub repository and is designed to be especially accessible through a turn-key virtual machine that facilitates interactive learning with an easy-to-use collection of IPython Notebooks.