This slim volume on data mining presents practical recipes for extracting and analyzing data from the Twitter social networking framework. A spin-off of the more comprehensive volume Mining the Social Web, also from O'Reilly, this volume provides code examples in the Python programming language for projects such as searching for tweets, capturing tweets in real time, harvesting friends and followers, analyzing friendship relationships, geocoding and resolving user profile information. Each recipe provides an example of a real world problem to solve and a brief discussion of the scripting methods employed to solve it. The work assumes a working knowledge of Python or other related languages. Access to additional online resources, including sample code, is provided. Russell is vice president of engineering at Digital Reasoning Systems, a data analysis firm. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)