The Jupyter Notebook

Table of contents

Welcome

Welcome to the Jupyter Notebook courseware for ITSE-1372 Int Comp Program Python at Austin Community College in Austin, TX.

The college website for this course is: https://www.austincode.com/baldwin/ .

The Jupyter Notebook

This is the web page for the competency titled The Jupyter Notebook. See the other pages in this online study guide for material that deals with the other competencies.

The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.

You will be expected to install and use a Jupyter Notebook for many of your programming efforts in this course. A tour (approximately 19 minutes) of the following three videos provides a quick introduction to the Jupyter Notebook.

The JupyterLab project

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although the names are similar, the Jupyter Notebook is not the same as JupyterLab. JupyterLab, which is currently under development, claims to enable users to work with the core building blocks of the classic Jupyter Notebook in a more flexible and integrated manner.

There is an excellent video titled JupyterLab: The Next-Generation Jupyter Frontend that provides an explanation of the project. This course does not address JupyterLab. However, you will probably want to monitor the progress of that project as you navigate through your career in data science because it promises to deliver a number of important improvements over the classic Jupyter Notebook.

External online resources

There is no shortage of free online resources for this competency. An Internet search will likely reveal many more. A large number of links to external resources on the Jupyter Notebook are provided on the Overview page. In addition to the three video links provided above, I will highlight some existing links and add some new links here. Many of these links allow you to download the actual notebook (.ipynb) file so that you can open it in the Jupyter Notebook on your machine and experiment with the code.

Internal online resources

The following example workbooks were created to help you learn the essentials of Jupyter Notebook. These examples are not intended to teach you the basics of using the Jupyter Notebook. You are expected to learn the basics, such as creating a notebook, naming a notebook, using menus, using keyboard shortcuts, etc. by studying the free online learning resources. Instead, these example notebooks are intended to show you how to perform some of the common operations that you will need to know when populating an existing notebook with markdown text, Python code, images, LaTex text, etc.

You can view a static HTML rendering of the notebook for each of these examples by clicking on the link in the following list. You can view the corresponding notebook file (filename.ipynb) by downloading this zip file, extracting the ipynb file into the file manager area of your Jupyter Notebook installation, and opening the ipynb file in Jupyter Notebook. The name of the ipynb file for each example notebook page is provided in the housekeeping material at the end of the notebook page.

You are encouraged to study these examples and exercises in parallel with your study of online resources for this competency. All of the homework assignments for this competency will deal with some aspect of Jupyter Notebook.

Assessment

Assessments such as assignments, quizzes, and tests will be administered through Blackboard. Some of the free online resources may also include graded assessments such as exercises and tests. You are encouraged to take advantage of those exercises and tests to enhance your ability to learn and retain the material. However, grades and credits associated with those resources will not be integrated into your grade for this course. Your grade for this course will be based solely on your grades on assignments, tests, and projects administered by your ACC instructor through Blackboard.

The assessments for this competency consist of several take-home assignments and one proctored test.

Housekeeping material

Author: Prof. Richard G. Baldwin
Affiliation: Professor of Computer Information Technology at Austin Community College in Austin, TX.
File: JupyterNotebook.htm
Revised: 09/04/18
Copyright 2018 Richard G. Baldwin

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