Learn about networks

Italian physicist Guido Caldarelli has an excellent new book out on networks. It's not exactly for the non-technical, but for anyone who really wants to learn the mathematical nuts and bolts of network theory, and to come to terms with degree distributions, adjacency matrices, clustering coefficients and the like.

If you want the more qualitative picture, you might begin with my Nexus (or either of two other popular books on the topic, Laszlo Barabasi's Linked or Duncan Watts' Small Worlds), but Guido's book is the first, to my knowledge, to put all the necessary technical information in one book that should appeal to technically-minded students interested in network science.