Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition

Author here. Although the software contained in the base is indeed relatively easy to install, you'd be surprised how often people struggle installing Python and its packages on Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows! The initial reason I created DST was that I'm currently writing a book called Data Science at the Command Line. Installing the command-line tools discussed in this book is unfortunately not straightforward. I wanted to offer potential readers a Vagrant box (with a shell provisioner) that installs these command-line tools. Similar to what Matthew Russell has done for his book Mining the Social Web [1]. This blog post [2] provides some more explanation and compares four different solutions. The software packages that you mention sure are exciting! If there is an author or teacher that wants to teach these to her readers or students, th

I strongly considered the approach of releasing the contents of my recent book online with Mining the Social Web 2E [1] but instead decided to pursue what I felt was a standard OSS model: release a really high quality version of the source code that's optimized for easy learning in IPython Notebook format (optionally packaged as a turn-key VM) on GitHub [2] with the book being a form of "premium support" for the codebase if people want to learn more or dig deeper. I touch on all of this somewhat in the book's blog's "book as a startup posts" [3], and it seems to be working well so far. I'm increasingly becoming interested in the prospect of releasing the entire contents of the book (both prose and source code) in IPython Notebook format so that you could read and work in the book seamlessly as "executable paper" like this full-text sample

I purchased Mining the Social Web, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2013) a few weeks ago and have been loving the IPython Notebook setup they're using to distribute the code examples. Anyone can clone the following git repo and play around with the code: https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Ed...

Awesome repo here: https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Ed...