Matthew Russell's 21 Recipes for Mining Twitter

This is a very short, very practical way to get you started exploring the Twitter APIs on your own. It offers a decent amount of code no experienced developer should have much trouble understanding and applying to his or her own needs. The cost per page is not exactly attractive and some readers may want a more in-depth less cookbook-like experience. If you are in a hurry to extract data from Twitter, this book may be for you - for less than $20 for the electronic edition, it will spare you more than that in time spent figuring out libraries and APIs. Plus, it offers some intro on many other interesting libraries that can be applied to a lot of problems besides Twitter mining.

You can buy the book from Amazon or directly from O'Reilly.