Books by author: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Barabasi does a very good job at making his research accessible. In the course of this book's two hundred pages of core content, he lucidly presents a handful of ideas about network theory that were groundbreaking not all that long ago. The presentation is padded with a lot of biographical and historical background of the people who made the discoveries, which may appeal to some readers (but not me).

I probably should have read this three years ago when it first came out. At this point, many of the ideas presented in it have diffused into almost common knowledge. I didn't learn much about network theory here, but it was nice to see examples drawn from many different domains, and as a result, I expect to see applications of the ideas in a lot of new areas. One obvious application that has interested me a lot recently is the bittorrent protocol, which embodies nearly all of the ideas presented in this book, plus a few very clever extensions.