Using notebooks

It is often easiest – and very useful – to do data analysis and prototyping using what we often affectionately just call notebooks. Jupyter defines the Jupyter notebook as a web-based interactive computing platform. I like that simple definition. Notebooks are essentially a series of “cells” that can contain code or text, which can be run individually or sequentially. This allows you to write code in a web browser, run the code while in the web browser, and see immediate results. For data analysis or experimentation, this immediate feedback is useful.

In this book, we use Jupyter Notebook. I recommend downloading and installing it from the Anaconda website. You can do so at https://www.anaconda.com.

In Jupyter, you can run code and see the immediate results of that code, whether the output be text, numeric, or a data visualization. You will see a lot of notebook use in this book, so I will keep this short.

Google Colab is another...