What is a Jupyter Notebook?

From jupyter’s own words:

“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. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.”

This is important because we’ll be able to work with documents that contain regular text, pictures, code, and whatever output your code produces!

For our purposes, Jupyter Lab is the coding environment where we’ll be writing our code. The file type that we’ll be primarily working with is the Jupyter Notebook. We’ll be writing our code in a Jupyter Notebook that is being run by Jupyter Lab. When we start running code, we’ll talk more about how exactly python enters into this equation.

We’re using Jupyter Notebooks for a number of reasons:

• they let us isolate small blocks of code easily
• they let us combine things like text instructions alongside code
• they are very commonly used in many computational disciplines (if you continue working with code, the chances that you’ll encounter jupyter notebooks is very high)