A quick overview of the Jupyter Notebook and IPython

Today, we’ll cover the basics of using the Jupyter Notebook effectively as an everyday tool, as well as using IPython as an improved Python environment.

From now on, to be able to follow easily along in class, the simplest setup for you will be to keep two copies of the class Github repository. The first one, you will clone from GitHub and you will never modify (unless you plan on submitting your changes back as a contribution/fix, which is very welcome). The second will be a local working copy of these materials, that you are free to work on and modify but where each week you’ll copy anew the new material for that week. That is:

  1. Create a clone of the official github repo in a location on your computer you’ll keep for reference. You can do this with the command:

    git clone https://github.com/berkeley-stat159-f17/stat159-f17.git stat159-f17-reference

    As the semester progresses, you will frequently go to this folder and issue a git pull command.

  2. Next, make a folder at the same level as stat159-f17-reference that you can call stat159-f17-working. There, you can copy the materials from the reference folder for each week and work on them modifying them at your heart’s content.

Class outline

Note: The notes for this lecture are just a small subset of the official IPython in-depth tutorial, which you can clone from github and study in more depth.