Today, there are several tools that help to perform operations and get the output directly with Python. Whether for data science or simple procedural programming, these tools are very useful.
I particularly came across one powerful tool and that's what I want to talk about. I find it very practical and perfect for those who are beginners in data science.
Throughout this article I will describe a specific tool named Jupyter Notebook and I will present some of its features.
What's Jupyter Notebook ?
It's an open-source online platform or web application used like an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Python. It provides a flexible, easy-to-use and interactive interface for data science. Jupyter Notebook doesn't only work as an IDE but also as a presentation and education tool. This tool can be used for many purposes.
What's Jupyter Notebook used for ?
The Jupyter Notebook online open-source platform helps to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. That means a lot : it can be used for data stuff such as data cleaning, data transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, just to name a few.
How to access Jupyter Notebook ?
Before this, let's have a look at how Jupyter Notebook is installed. There are many ways to do it, but here I'll only show one way.
First, be sure you have Python installed on your machine : You can check it by opening your command prompt and typing
pip --version. You should have the version of Python run on your system.Second, type
pip install jupyterand in a few minutes jupyter notebook will be installed on your machine.Then, choose a particular directory and open it in your command prompt. This directory is where you want your jupyter notebook to be run. If you're sure you are in your folder, type the command
jupyter notebook. You will be redirected to your browser and probably have such an interface:
It's quite intuitive and easy to use. In fact, you can learn how to create a new python file, add a title to your file or execute your first Hello World here !
Once the file is created, your jupyter notebook's interface looks like this :
Working with Jupyter Notebook provides a lot of benefits.
What are the advantages of using Jupyter Notebook ?
The variety of language : With Jupyter Notebook, you have a large choice (over 40) of programming languages including Python, R and Scala.
The ability to share : The Jupyter Notebook allows the collaboration. You can share your work with your coworkers through email , github , dropbox and Jupyter Notebook Viewer .
The interactive output : Thanks to that amazing tool, you can produce rich, interactive output: HTML, images, graphics, videos, LaTeX, and custom MIME types.
The Big Data Integration : The platform is so flexible that it can leverage big data tools, such as Apache Spark, from Python, R and Scala. It can also be used for data exploration with pandas, scikit-learn, ggplot2 and TensorFlow.
The last, but not least ?
An important thing I want to emphasize on is that, despite the fact that Jupyter Notebook opens in a web browser, it's hosted and run on your local machine.
Hope this will help !