Jupyter Notebooks and Setup

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that lets you create and share documents containing live code, equations, visualisations, and narrative text. It is the standard interactive development environment for data science, and you will use it throughout this course.

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What is Jupyter?

The name "Jupyter" stands for the three core programming languages it was designed to support: Julia, Python, and R. Today, Jupyter supports over 40 languages through different kernels, but Python remains the most popular.

A Jupyter notebook is a .ipynb file (IPython Notebook) that consists of an ordered list of cells. Each cell can contain:

• Code — Python code that can be executed interactively
• Markdown — Formatted text, headings, lists, links, and images
• Raw — Unformatted text passed through without processing

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Installing Python and Jupyter

Step 1: Install Python

If you don't already have Python installed, download it from python.org or use a package manager:

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install python

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3 python3-pip

# Windows — download the installer from python.org

Verify your installation:

python3 --version
# Python 3.12.x (or similar)