“Small World” (or “Nexus”) – Mark Buchanan

It was a mistake to read both Barabási’s “Linked” and this book by science journalist Mark Buchanan. At least in such a short space of time, but I’m tempted to say you’ll really ever only need one or the other. Published within a few months of each other in 2002, not only do these two books cover exactly the same topic (small world, scale-free networks in everday life) but they use the same anecdotes (lame Bill Clinton jokes, Internet hacker stories, the excitement of having an Erdös number – mine is 4!) and even some of the same chapter titles. I can only imagine how mortifying it must have been to find out about each other.

As this review must necessarily be a comparison to the book I read first, let me just say they both have slightly different focal points. Although both authors are physicists by training, Buchanan gives a little more detail about the biological networks found, like the neural connections of C.elegans, while Barabási concentrates more on his own playground – the internet and WWW.

Overall, Buchanan’s style surprisingly is a little less readable than Barabási’s, or maybe I was just not as tolerant the second time round. There is quite an abstract chapter about rivers and the modelling of their meandering course to the sea and Small World is longer without saying much more than Linked.

To be fair, I would still recommend this book as an introduction to network theory. I just felt a little cheated.