More reviewing...pt2

So, I've started on the first chapter of "Mining the Social Web" proper, and realise it will involve much side reading, as 1) you really do need to know python (although this is already installed in OSX, joy!) 2) you really need to read all the APIs and 3) it looks like the book is going to look to install a large number of python packages. Still, using the twitter package and pulling down the timeline content in terminal is quite cool.

I think I will probably need a once through hands-off, then a once through hands-on, as the first chapter is moving pretty fast, and making some fairly heavy assumptions on development confidence.

Starting out on the O'Reilly Blogger Review Programme

Those nice folks at O'Reilly have started a Blogger Review Programme, and kindly let me be a part of it. Essentially you commit to write a review of an O'Reilly tome in return for a digital review copy - just like I remember it from my real journalism days!

I've been insomniac the past couple of nights (it is 3:45am in Geneva), mostly churning some Measurement & Analytics annoyances in my head, so am now sitting reading the intro. to my first Blogger Review book "Mining the Social Web" (and I suppose I should really try and write this posting in hReview (but I can't be bothered)). So first thoughts are: looks interesting - looks like social network analysis for the social web, so ties nicely into some of my usual old hobby-horses. First gripe would be that all the code is in Python (which I don't know), so I'll have to get to grips with that. It looks like it might hook in nicely with the really interesting, but slightly forbidding "Programming Collective Intelligence" (which if I remember right is also chock-full of Python) - could be a useful companion piece.

Since the O'Reilly review is a 200 worder, I'll try and run a longer review chunk by chunk as I work my way through the book, and then try to some up the overall impression.