Introduction to Colaboratory

What is Colaboratory? Colaboratory is a web-based research tool for doing machine learning and deep learning. It is essentially like Jupyter Notebook. Colaboratory is becoming very popular these days as it requires no setup.

Colaboratory is free to use and is compatible with most major browsers. The company in charge of the development of the Colaboratory tool is Google^?. As opposed to Jupyter notebooks, in Colaboratory you are running everything on the cloud and not on your own computer. Here is the catch: you need a Google account since all the Colaboratory notebooks are saved into your personal Google Drive space. However, if you do not have a Google account, you can still continue reading to see how you can install every piece of Python library you will need to run things on your own. Still, I highly recommend you create a Google account, if only just to learn deep learning using the Colaboratory notebooks of this book.

When you run your code on Colaboratory, it runs on a dedicated virtual machine, and here is the fun part: you can have a GPU allocated to use! Or you can also use a CPU if you want. Whenever you are not running something, Colaboratory will deallocate resources (you know, because we all want to work), but you can reconnect them at any time.

If you are ready, go ahead and navigate to this link: https://colab.research.google.com/

If you are interested in more information and a further introduction to Colaboratory, search for Welcome to Colaboratory!. Now that you have accessed the previous link, let us get started with TensorFlow.