Mining the Social Web - Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites

Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell is a delightful reading which covers a wide array of very pertinent social media technologies. When working in the field of social media and web mining, one comes across a plethora of buzz words, tools and techniques to do various web data analysis tasks. This book does a great job at demystifying these topics. What I liked most about Mining the Social Web is that it takes a specific area such as TF-IDF and then connects the dots with various intertwined technologies (bi-grams, graph visualization, cosine similarity) to paint the big picture in terms of practical usage. Even though there are several prerequisites (python is a big one) and a small learning curve for the tools introduced in the book, it's well written and easy to follow.