Jupyter notebook is very powerful editor tool for programming languages like python, Julia, R etc, and is a free and open source.Lately, it is becoming very popular among programmers because it lets us to create and share documents containing live codes, outputs, equations, visualizations and texts. Which means jupyter notebook can contain both codes as well as rich-text elements.
Jupyter notebook is a server-client based application, which means it allows us to open and run notebooks in our browser creating a local server and execute them on our pc.
You need Python to be installed on your system to be able to install and run jupyter notebook. Here I prefer installing Anaconda distribution because it will automatically install python,jupyter and many more python packages so you don't have to install them one by one manually. It will save loads of time and increase your productivity.
Open jupyter notebook from launcher file, or open it from the command prompt by just running jupyter notebook or jupyter-notebook command.
You will notice following window after finishing the initialization of jupyter.
Then a home jupyter dashboard window will automatically open in our browser. The default file tab looks and works like file explorer and shows files from the directory where we opened jupyter notebook.
You can always choose your own path to open jupyter notebook simply by changing the path from command.
Default Running Tab shows all the active terminal sessions and kernels.Where we have the option to shutdown them when needed.
While inside file tab, on the upper right side we can find two options upload and new.
We can upload files inside any directory/subdirectory using this upload option here.
The New option there lets us create new notebooks, folders, terminals and text file etc.
For creating a new notebook, choose a folder or create a folder where you want to create and save the notebook.
From inside the folder, click on that New button we talked before and click on Python 3(I am using Python 3 in this tutorial) to create a new notebook with python.
You can see here a notebook mainly consists of Header with notebook title, menu and toolbar, and a body part where we write our codes and texts inside cells.
There are three types of cells in jupyter notebook.And we can easily choose them from the toolbar of notebook editor.
Code cell type is where we actually write codes.
In markdown cell, we can write our texts in markdown format and it will return output as html format.
We simply can write texts without formatting in raw text cell.
Here's the screenshot of toolbar from jupyter notebook highlighting various options it has there.