Social Network Analysis of Ajax Books

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, August 21, 2006 @ 9:00 am

I've done this sort of analysis a few times, first with Knowledge Management, then with Business Rules Engines. I felt it was about time to do it for Ajax books. First some explanations.

This is a little game I play with Amazon. All you need is a starting list of important Ajax books. For each book, you find out on Amazon that "customers who bought this book also bought..." a bunch of other books. You take those new books and repeat the process until either no new books show up or you run out of patience and disk space. Then you put your results, a so-called directed graph, into a file and load it up in the nice and free graph analysis tool, Pajek, to see what sort of structure you can discern.

The 18 books I started out with were the following:

• "Ajax Hacks (Hacks)"
• "Programming Atlas"
• "Sams Teach Yourself AJAX in 10 Minutes (Sams Teach Yourself in 10 Minutes)"
• "Pro Ajax and the .NET 2.0 Platform (Pro)"
• "Ajax Patterns and Best Practices (Expert's Voice)"
• "Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components (Pro)"
• "Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)"
• "Professional Ajax (Programmer to Programmer)"
• "Foundations of Ajax (Foundation)"
• "Foundations of Atlas: Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.NET 2.0"
• "Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer"
• "Ajax For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))"
• "Ajax And Php: Building Responsive Web Applications"
• "Build Your Own Ajax Web Applications"
• "Ajax in Action"
• "Head Rush Ajax"
• "Ajax: Your visual blueprint for creating rich Internet applications (Wiley Visual Imprint)"
• "Ajax Design Patterns"

After three iterations, we've come up with a list of 121 books. You can find the Pajek network file for this list here.

Some initial observations:

• The network blows up and extends into areas not strictly related to Ajax.
• Atlas books form a distinct subnet of their own.
• There are somewhat smaller distinct subnets along language lines: PHP, Ruby, Java, etc.
• Javascript/DHTML/CSS is central to the network, with the exception of the Atlas/.NET subnet. Interesting.
• It looks like Ruby programmers are reading up on OOAD.

You can analyze this data until the cows come home, but to keep things simple, I've taken an approach very similar to the one used by Google: hubs and authorities. In simple terms, authorities are the books that all the other ones point to, and hubs are the books that point to a lot of authorities. (See here for details.) We'll leave aside whether it's better to be a hub or an authority; let's just agree that it's good to be either. In the graph above, the yellow nodes are authorities, the red nodes are hubs, and the green nodes are both. I've pulled together the "important" nodes below:

1. "Ajax in Action"
2. "Professional Ajax (Programmer to Programmer)"
3. "Head Rush Ajax"
4. "Ajax Patterns and Best Practices (Expert's Voice)"
5. "DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model"
6. "Foundations of Ajax (Foundation)"
7. "Hibernate in Action (In Action series)"
8. "DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model"
9. "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition"
10. "Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS"
11. "CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Solutions)"
12. "Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Professional Guides)"
13. "Ajax Design Patterns"

Now some of the books in this network may have been released relatively recently and so haven't worked their way up the "also bought" list. Thats why I like to run this analysis once a year or so. If there are any books you think I should have included in my initial seeding, please let me know.

Technorati : ajax, books, social network analysis

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Comments: 6 so far

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1. 

   really neat analysis idea - is there anyway of extending it in a qualitative fashion 0 ie to discriminate between a contentless repeater of buzzwords and a genuine innovator - ie some kind of weighting of the links as opposed to a straight count of the links?

   could you republish the list giving their status re hub, authority or joint status?

   Comment by arthur doohan, Monday, August 21, 2006 @ 12:52 pm

2. 

   Check out this analysis of political books in the USA…

   http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html

   or this original white paper on ‘book networks’…

   http://www.orgnet.com/booknet.html

   Comment by Valdis Krebs, Wednesday, August 23, 2006 @ 3:04 pm

3. 

   Valdis,

   thanks for the comment. I remember coming across your paper when I was researching social network analysis for use in the knowledge management system of a large financial services company.

   Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, August 23, 2006 @ 3:19 pm

4. 

   Nice idea. In my country, Italy, SNA is a topic of articles, online discussions anc academic courses.

   Not yet a tool/approach used by organization to find out more about how they work, decide etc.

   I have created COMPLEXLAB to help the growing of culture and usage of SNA in Italy and I have created a refrence to your AJAX books analisys.

   Well done.

   Ciao
   Carlo

   Comment by Carlo Mazzucchelli, Monday, August 28, 2006 @ 12:10 pm

5. 

   Here is Good tutorial for AJAX
   http://gohil.dharmesh.googlepages.com/ajax.html

   Comment by Ajaxpert, Friday, November 16, 2007 @ 6:05 am

6. 

   Hey this is fantastic. I am working on a similar idea(I actually got it from Valdis Krebs) and I have made a few clusters and it is good. I have a couple of questions, if you have a moment to answer:

   1. How many books do you choose from the “Customers Also Bought List”
   2. Are you doing this all by hand, or are you doing any automation.

   Anyhow, great job and I appreciate any insight you may have to offer.

   Comment by synchronous, Friday, January 25, 2008 @ 3:12 pm

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