Installing Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter is a platform for Python development that contains some tools and environments for running Python and has more features than the standard interpreter. It contains the powerful Jupyter Notebook, which allows you to write programs in a web browser. It also formats your code, shows output, and allows you to annotate your scripts. It is a great tool for exploring datasets and we will be using it as our main environment for the code in this book.

To install the Jupyter Notebook on your computer, you can type the following into a command line prompt (not into Python):

    $ conda install jupyter notebook

You will not need administrator privileges to install this, as Anaconda keeps packages in the user's directory.

With the Jupyter Notebook installed, you can launch it with the following:

    $ jupyter notebook

Running this command will do two things. First, it will create a Jupyter Notebook instance - the backend - that will run in the command prompt you just used. Second, it will launch your web browser and connect to this instance, allowing you to create a new notebook. It will look something like the following screenshot (where you need to replace /home/bob with your current working directory):

To stop the Jupyter Notebook from running, open the command prompt that has the instance running (the one you used earlier to run the jupyter notebook   command). Then, press Ctrl + C and you will be prompted Shutdown this notebook server (y/[n])?. Type y and press Enter and the Jupyter Notebook will shut down.