Preface

Network science is becoming an increasingly valuable skill for both researchers and data scientists. Tools originally developed by sociologists and other researchers working with pen and paper have seen a resurgence as online platforms and social networks create huge datasets and advances in computer hardware make it feasible to analyze those data sets.

NetworkX is a free, open source Python package for network science. Python has become a popular choice for data scientists, with packages such as NumPy and pandas, making  NetworkX a natural choice for augmenting data analysis with network-based techniques. Because NetworkX is written entirely in Python, it is easy to install across many different platforms. Other packages written in lower-level languages can sometimes provide better performance on very large networks, but can be difficult to install on some systems, and might not run at all on others. NetworkX is a great tool for learning network science and writing code that you can share with anyone.

Because NetworkX is free software, distributed under the Modified BSD License, anyone is free to use it, to look at the code, and to make improvements. As a result, NetworkX has a large and ever-growing set of features. And if it's missing something, you can always add it yourself rather than waiting for someone else to do it.