IPython Notebook Essentials
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About This Book
- Perform Computational Analysis interactively
- Create quality displays using matplotlib and Python Data Analysis
- Step-by-step guide with a rich set of examples and a thorough presentation of The IPython Notebook
Who This Book Is For
If you are a professional, student, or educator who wants to learn to use IPython Notebook as a tool for technical and scientific computing, visualization, and data analysis, this is the book for you. This book will prove valuable for anyone that needs to do computations in an agile environment.
What You Will Learn
- Quickly install and get started with IPython Notebook
- Create interactive widgets in the Notebook
- Master the Notebook's interface and navigation features
- Create publication-quality graphs and displays of data with matplotlib
- Add media to the Notebook with IPython's Rich Display System
- Accelerate code using NumbaPro and concurrent computing
- Perform advanced scientific computations with SciPy
- Work with data in the Notebook with pandas
In Detail
In data science, it is difficult to present interesting visual or technical content, as it involves scientific notations that are not easy to type in a normal document format. IPython provides a web-based UI called Notebook, which creates a working environment for interactive computing that combines code execution with computational documents. IPython Notebook makes the task simpler as it was developed for scientific programming to solve larger problems through a series of smaller programs. IPython Notebook is used to learn Python in a fun and interactive way and to do some serious parallel / technical computing.
The book begins with an introduction to the efficient use of IPython Notebook for interactive computation. The book then focuses on the integration of technologies such as matplotlib, pandas, and SciPy. The book is aimed at empowering you to work with IPython Notebook for interactive computing, configuring it, creating your own notebooks / research documents. You will learn how IPython lets you perform efficient computations through examples with NumPy, data analysis with pandas, and visualization with matplotlib.
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Product details
- Publisher : Packt Publishing (November 21, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 190 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1783988347
- ISBN-13 : 978-1783988341
- Item Weight : 11.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.5 x 0.43 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,677,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,903 in Mathematical & Statistical Software
- #4,340 in Python Programming
- #11,314 in Computer Programming Languages
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Don't mistake this book for simply covering just IPython on Notebook. The first two chapters teach you the ropes of the software, and the later chapters cover generating graphs with matplotlib, processing & analyzing data with Pandas (a Python software library), and doing more advanced mathematics with the SciPy, Numba, and NumbaPro libraries.
IPython Notebook Essentials is a light introduction (IPython itself is fairly easy to pick up), but the strength of the book is that it brings the reader into contact with several related libraries. The examples in the book might not be exactly relevant to your field, but the skills they demonstrate will be. Following along with them on your own computer will let you get the most from this book.
The main criticism I would have of the book is that it is wide but not deep. But if you understand this going into the book, you won't be disappointed.
If you want to learn programming in general, this is not the book for you. If you don't mind haphazardly sorting through free tutorials on the web, then you can learn the same concepts that are presented in this book. But if you are in the particular niche of scientist or administrator who needs to do number crunching, has a small amount of previous Python programming experience, and want a light introduction to the Python ecosystem of data analysis tools, IPython Notebook Essentials is a good start.
Disclosure: I received a free ebook review copy of IPython Notebook Essentials from Packt Publishing for the purposes of writing this review. I do not have any business ties to Packt Publishing.
In chapter two, we learn more about the Notebook’s interface. Here we learn how to edit and navigate the Notebook and IPython magics. You will also learn how to run script and load and save data. The chapter ends with a few examples showing how to embed images, Youtube videos and HTML in your Notebook. I liked this chapter quite a bit.
For chapter three, we change gears dramatically. From this point on until we reach the appendices, the book is basically for scientists. This chapter is about creating plots and animations with Matplotlib inside the Notebook. The Notebook itself is rarely discussed.
Chapter four is all about the pandas project, which is a powerful library for data handling and analytics. This is outside my field, so I cannot comment on its accuracy, let alone understand everything the author writes about in this chapter. Suffice it to say, I only skimmed chapter four.
Chapter five is about SciPy, Numba and NumbaPro. Once again, the focus is on scientific computations (SciPy) and how to accelerate those computations (Numba/NumbaPro). I skipped this chapter too.
The Appendices cover the following: An IPython Notebook Reference Card, A brief overview of the Python language, and NumPy Arrays.
Going into this book, I assumed that it would be a guide to the IPython Notebook. The title certainly gives one that impression. However, the majority of the book is not about the IPython Notebook at all and instead focuses on scientific computing with Python. There are many other books that cover that topic and perhaps the IPython Notebook is used mostly by scientists. The preface states that the book is supposed to be learning about the Notebook too along with some of these other libraries. I just felt that the scientific libraries got the majority of the prose and the Notebook got short shrift.
If you are looking for a guide to the IPython Notebook, I’m not sure I can recommend this book for you. It only has 2 chapters that focus exclusively on that topic plus a reference card in the appendix. On the other hand, if you are looking for a very brief overview of some of the scientific libraries you can use in Python plus learn how to use the IPython Notebook in general, then this might be the book for you.
