written by Nick Hodgskin

What’s a Jupyter?

Jupyter Notebook is a notebook environment used for running .ipynb (iPython Notebook) files. These files combine markdown blocks/cells (ie. text cells, that contain paragraphs, tables, LaTeX equations, bold text) as well as Python code blocks. These blocks can be run in any order (typically run top to bottom) with a memory of what was run before.

This allows you to intersperse discussion with the code that you used to generate your results (perfect for reports and reproducible work!).

This also makes it easy to tweak things (ie. to change my plot title, I don’t need to rerun my 30 minute simulation).

Compare this to normal .py files which:

• Have limited ways of writting paragraphs (ie. only in comment blocks)
• Everything runs top to bottom, and debugging often requires you to run the whole file again.

<aside> ✅ Jupyter Notebooks are ubiquitous through computational science disciplines and industries, hence knowing how to use them is a really nice skill to know.

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<aside> 🤯 You can use Jupyter with other languages (ie. different kernels, which handle the logic of the code cells). Jupyter:

• Ju: Julia
• pyt: Python
• e: ?
• r: R And I only found that out like a week ago 🤣

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Lets set up a Jupyter Notebook environment! We have two options, an online environment or a local environment. Here’s a list of pros and cons of each to help you decide!: