It’s hard to say which book is better, as it depends a lot on what you’re looking for. Menczer’s book does a great job of introducing you to the basic concepts of network theory from a hands on perspective with Python code available through a companion GitHub repo. Barabasi’s book goes into a lot more depth and gives a bit more of an historical perspective of how things developed, but it is significantly more theoretical/mathematical in its presentation.

Full Disclosure I was a co-author of Menczer's, collaborated with his group for several years, and know all the authors personally. I met and spoke with Barabasi multiple times over the years but never worked with him directly.

<ShamelessPlug> you might also want to checkout my substack Graphs for Data Science: https://graphs4sci.substack.com/ where in each post I look at algorithm, implement it in Python, and explore it in a toy problem before showing you how to applying it to a real world dataset. </ShamelessPlug>

Oh wow, hi Bruno (so much for Anon84 haha)! Thanks for the reply. Your book sounds much more like what I'm looking for. I did not know it has Python code to go along with; that's a huge plus for me. Your Substack looks great as well, looking forward to digging into it.