Python Basics #6 — Jupyter Notebook

Programming Language Python
2 min read

In today’s lesson we’ll cover Jupyter Notebook.

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based application that, like IPython, provides interactive live code. With Jupyter Notebook, you can type code you want to run inside a web browser and see the result right there.

On top of that, the browser lets you express mathematical formulas that are hard to render in regular programs, and you can generate all kinds of charts to visualize data.

Because you can add narrative text and images to build a notebook document and share it, Jupyter Notebook is also widely used as a presentation tool, much like PowerPoint or Keynote.

Jupyter Notebook is open source, so you can download and use it for free.

When I first used this program it was called IPython Notebook, but a few years ago the project was renamed to Jupyter Notebook.

Jupyter Notebook consists of the following four components:

  • Notebook document When the Notebook app runs, it creates a file called a notebook document and stores all the code you run inside the web browser in this file.

  • Jupyter Notebook App Jupyter Notebook is a server-client application. If a network connection is available, you can use the Notebook application running on a remote server.

  • Kernel (IPython) IPython is used as Jupyter Notebook’s kernel. The kernel is the computation engine that runs the code stored in the notebook document. Depending on the computation it runs, the kernel can use a fairly large amount of CPU and memory. Note that the kernel does not release the memory it holds until it is stopped.

  • Notebook Dashboard This is the user interface that appears first in the web browser when the Notebook app is launched. The dashboard is used to open notebook documents and manage kernels.

List of kernels supported by the notebook: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels

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