What an engrossing read!
I must admit I fret at the beginning, how I can embark on the most advanced and seemingly difficult topics as R, Social Media, together? But somewhere early in chapter 2 I relaxed, thanks to Richard and Nathan who delivered the not so familiar (to me) content gradually and with much aplomb. I liked the R primer in same chapter.
Getting Twitter data turned to be a breeze as you will see in chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 are not exactly technical, for example they expand on the nature of sentiments, social behaviour, and mentioned a few pitfalls, however to my surprise, I enjoyed them a lot. Most importantly, these two chapters serve as a base to the rest of the book in terms of a model on which the analysis is going to be conducted. Chapter 6 is where you work hard, but not too hard than it would make you put the book away and shut your computer down, rather it was fun full of algorithms, graphics and cool insight!
I finished this book in no time, but wish it was longer. Certainly, the authors are the ones I will be looking for to buy more books from.
Like I said, this is a somewhat a short book, but it covers what it promises very well, for those who wish to expand further the authors provide a list of related literature.
I think a contractor wishing to deliver a social analysis assignment fast should not look any further. And one can sure expand further than extracting tweets. I trust the principals and techniques remain almost the same.
In terms of my closing notes, the reader needs to be familiar with Git[Hub], some or no R and better running a 64 bit OS, preferably Linux or Mac (mainly because these OSes already come with tools as CURL). The book publisher site is http://www.packtpub.com/social-media-....
Oh, and the book rating by me is 5 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment