There's some good code in here. If you're of a slightly more of a machine learning bent, consider looking into Collective Intelligence (has great source code as well - http://examples.oreilly.com/9780596529321/). It will be a great addition on top of this book.
Of course, when you're ready to graduate, look into Lucene & Mahout for some heavy duty stuff. If you want to make any of these map-reduce'able, Yelp's Mr. Job (also Python) is a handy tool.
I just browsed the code and pre-ordered the book. It uses the NLTK toolkit for NLP and has useful plumbing code for authenticating with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, etc.
Of course, when you're ready to graduate, look into Lucene & Mahout for some heavy duty stuff. If you want to make any of these map-reduce'able, Yelp's Mr. Job (also Python) is a handy tool.
On top of that, the BackType blog is always full of gems. Their recent dissection of the #lessambitiousmovies trend on twitter was quite interesting (http://blog.backtype.com/2011/01/analysis-of-the-lessambitio...)