I’ve become a big fan of the programming language Python, and have been using a number of tools to play around with the language. I’m also helping my son learn Python, and walking him through various coding illustrations.

I’ve tried a variety of tools and IDEs, including…

• IDLE
• The Python REPL within a terminal
• Geany IDE
• Visual Studio Code
• Sublime Text
• repl.it
• trinket.io

All of these options have their good and bad points, but the one I’ve really fallen for is Jupyter Notebooks, from http://jupyter.org/

Why Jupyter?

I find that Jupyter is a great place to experiement with Python, but in a way that I can save and re-use those experiements. It has the casual stype of a REPL, but is document-centric so I can save my session. It also makes it really easy to take an experimentation session and augment it with comments and notes.

Installing Jupyter

I would strongly recommend not using the visual installer for Jupyter. Instead, install it as any other package, within a virtual environment. I do this so that I can control exactly which version of Jupter, and any other dependencies, I’m using. I can also then commit those package requirements into git more easily.

Here’s what I do:

1. Create a virtual environment in whatever way you normally do this (for me, that’s python3 -m venv venv within the folder I’m going to store my notebooks)
2. Activate that venv, and then pip install jupyter

This will install Jupyter Notebook within your virtual environment.

1. pip install anything else you might want
2. Run jupyter notebook to start the local notebook webserver

At this point, your browser should open and you should be ready to go.

Finally

I shall be sharing some notebooks in the near future. That’s the other thing I love about Jupyter Notebooks; it’s so easy to upload them to github.com and then either share them directy from there, or via the Jupyter website.