Mining the Social Web, by Matthew A. Russell
This book covers a lot of ground. It's, at times, a bit vertiginous in the amount of subjects and technologies it touches per chapter, and is not always easy to follow. It can also introduce so many interesting things that, by the time you finished becoming familiar with all of them, after wandering for hours on the web, jumping from interesting technology to interesting technology, you may have forgotten what took you to these places and wonder where you were in the book. Time spent reading it is, however, time very well spent. When you finish it, you will have at least a cursory familiarity with tools like OAuth, CouchDB, Redis, MapReduce, NumPy (and the Python programming language, albeit it will help you a lot if you know your way around Python before you start the book), Graphviz, SIMILE widgets, NLTK, various service APIs and data formats, and will be well equipped to explore those rich datasets on your own. The chapters are well compartmentalized and it's easy to pick chapters to read according to your needs. I know that, when I face the problems they tackle, I will do exactly that.
If you do any kind of analysis and visualization of social-generated data that's on the web, this book is a good pick. Even if your datasets are not from the web, you may find the parts on analysis and visualization very interesting.
You can find this book at the O'Reilly website or on Amazon.
Disclosure: I reviewed this book for the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. If you have a blog and love to read, you should take a look into it. It's fun.
On "Closure: The Definitive Guide" by Michael Bolin
“Closure: The Definitive Guide” by Michael Bolin does a nice job on explaining a battle-tested, very complex tool that helps maintaining very complex JavaScript codebases manageable and understandable. Appendix B itself is worth the book, as it explains many of the JavaScript quirks to newbies and made me learn I was not as good as I thought I was. The world would be a better place if all JavaScript programmers read the appendix.
The rest of the book is what I expected - it teaches the reader how to build an application using Closure to your advantage, making your code more future-proof, browser-proof, more expressive, verifiable and testable. It covers the Closure Library, the Closure Compiler (a tool able to compile your JavaScript code into very compact JavaScript and Java that runs on your server - and, maybe, your mobile too), templates, widgets, AJAX, automated building and debugging. While we learn all that, the author also teaches us about the process of making a Google-sized web application. If you are at all familiar with JavaScript, the idea of doing a huge application is terrifying. After reading the book, while still scary, at least if feels possible to mere mortals.
If you are feeling the pressure of maintaining a big JavaScript project and is considering selling management the idea of migrating it to a JavaScript framework that encourages good practices (JavaScript makes it very easy to shoot yourself in the foot), this may be the book for you.
You can grab it directly on the O'Reilly web site. The e-book version comes without DRM and has Kindle, ePub, PDF and Android versions.
