What you need for this book

The code examples provided in this book assume that you are running a recent version of Python on either Linux, macOS, or Windows. The code has been tested on Python 3.4.* and Python 3.5.*. Older versions (Python 3.3.* or Python 2.*) are not explicitly supported.

Chapter 1, Social Media, Social Data, and Python, provides some instructions to set up a local development environment and introduces a brief list of tools that are going to be used throughout the book. We're going to take advantage of some of the essential Python libraries for scientific computing (for example, NumPy, pandas, and matplotlib), machine learning (for example, scikit-learn), NLP (for example, NLTK), and social network analysis (for example, NetworkX).