Intro to Jupyter Notebooks

Vicky Steeves and Nicholas Wolf

Jupyter Notebooks Overview

Web Application

In-browser editing for code with auto-syntax highlighting, indentation, tab completion/introspection
In-browser code execution, with results attached to the code that generated them
Easily include math markdown using LaTeX
Display results of computation in rich media (LaTeX, HTML, SVG, etc.)

Jupyter Notebooks Overview

Notebook

A complete computation record of a session, interleaving executable code with text, maths, and rich representations of objects
Can export to LaTeX, PDF, slideshows, etc. or available from a public URL that renders it as a static webpage

Examples

Analyzing Whale Tracks, by Roberto De Almeida
A Reconstruction of 538 2012 Election Model, by Skipper Seabold

Installation

Install Jupyter Notebooks on Desktop Quickly Using Anaconda: https://www.anaconda.com/download/

Today’s Example Notebook Workspace: index.ipynb

Download this file and save it in a directory where you can find it.

Jupyter Notebook Cheatsheet

Launch Notebook in a Directory Other than Home:
jupyter notebook --notebook-dir=PATH-TO-FOLDER

Code Cells:

Notebook will evaluate final statement in cell
Use shift + enter to run an active cell
Use esc in highlighted cell to toggle command options:
- esc + L = show line numbers
- esc + M = format cell as Markdown cell
- esc + a = insert cell above current cell
- esc + b = insert cell below current cell
Check all current variables: run %whos

Jupyter Notebook Cheatsheet

Tidy Display of Pandas Dataframes and Inline Images:

from IPython.display import Image as IM
from IPython.display import display

(Other types: file links, audio files, code, and more. See here)

Creating and Displaying Interactive Plots:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

Jupyter Notebook Cheatsheet

Using IPython Display:

display(dataframe)
display(image)

Make a Basic Scatter Plot:

x = list of values
y = list of values
plt.scatter(x, y) plt.xlabel('X Axis') plt.xlabel('Y Axis')

Jupyter Notebook Cheatsheet

Markdown Cells:

When run, a markdown cell will display markdown or html that you enter (that means all sort of rich content, including images)
Essential markdown summary: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Moving a Notebook to the Web

Using NBViewer: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/:

Put notebook (.ipynb) file on the web (e.g. Github, Gitlab...somewhere so that URL is http://NAME-OF-NOTEBOOK.ipynb
Enter the URL into NBViewer.
Click Go! (check out example here)

Moving a Notebook to the Web

Using NBConvert: https://github.com/jupyter/nbconvert:

In directory of your notebook, enter:
jupyter nbconvert --output-dir='./docs' --to html *.ipynb
This gives you a directory called “docs” which has HTML files. If you put these files on GitHub or GitLab, you can render them as webpages.
Example: https://vickysteeves.gitlab.io/Stories-Code-Data-Py/

More on Jupyter Notebooks

Excellent Tutorial by Justin Bois at Caltech:
http://bebi103.caltech.edu.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/2015/tutorials/t0b_intro_to_jupyter_notebooks.html#Best-practices-for-code-cells

Jupyter.org Documentation for Jupyter Notebooks:
https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Questions?

Email us: vicky.steeves@nyu.edu & nicholas.wolf@nyu.edu

Learn more about RDM: guides.nyu.edu/data_management

Get this presentation: guides.nyu.edu/data_management/resources

Make an appointment: guides.nyu.edu/appointment