Jupyter Notebook
Definition
Project Jupyter is a project and community whose goal is to "develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages". A Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment for creating documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
Why It Matters
Jupyter Notebooks have become the standard environment for interactive data science and machine learning. They allow for a literate programming style where code, its output, and explanations can be combined in a single document, which is ideal for exploration and sharing results.
Contextual Example
A data scientist explores a new dataset in a Jupyter Notebook. They write a code cell to load the data, another to create a plot, and a markdown cell to write down their observations. This creates a complete record of their analysis.
Common Misunderstandings
- Jupyter supports many programming languages, not just Python (though Python is the most common).
- Google Colab is a popular free, cloud-based Jupyter Notebook environment.