Chapter 1. A Tour of the IPython Notebook

This chapter gives a brief introduction to the IPython notebook and highlights some of its special features that make it a great tool for scientific and data-oriented computing. IPython notebooks use a standard text format that makes it easy to share results.

After the quick installation instructions, you will learn how to start the notebook and be able to immediately use IPython to perform computations. This simple, initial setup is all that is needed to take advantage of the many notebook features, such as interactively producing high quality graphs, performing advanced technical computations, and handling data with specialized libraries.

All examples are explained in detail in this book and available online. We do not expect the readers to have deep knowledge of Python, but readers unfamiliar with the Python syntax can consult Appendix B, A Brief Review of Python, for an introduction/refresher.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Getting started with Anaconda or Wakari
• Creating notebooks and then learning about the basics of editing and executing statements
• An applied example highlighting the notebook features