Emil Begtrup-Bright

A very good handbook, with a lot of useful, practical tips. Obviosly written by very skilled network researchers. I learned a lot. I have a quite harsh critique of the technical side, but make no mistake, this is a great book. But such a shame it does not achieve the same excelence in the programming side of things. The programming side is outdated. The package used is made by the authors themselves, and is not on CRAN, and not even on github. They say that it 'will be', but since putting something on github takes like 10 minutes, I'm not convinced of this promise. I don't trust the reliability of a package with such dubious access. Also, the function names uses capital letters, which is a practice that has been abandonded long ago, and for good reason. Also, alot of the most fundamental functions used seem to have an equivalent in igraph, the major package for network analysis in R. Why not use that when possible? It uses modern naming conventions and is on CRAN. There are so many implementations of the basic metriccs in sna, do we really need yet another package that does the same? And if it does it better, then in what sense? This adds confusion, and they don't even clarify their choices.Tthe book's ends with "using R", but why not include the tried-and tested tools for analysis that already exists? And if there is a good reason, please write this in the book. All in all, a very good book, but with some major flaws on the technical side. Hopes the next version will correct this.