Jupyter Notebooks

A Jupyter Notebook is an interactive environment for writing and running code alongside text, visualisations, and media. It’s widely used for data science, machine learning, research, prototyping, and teaching. It allows a mixing of interactive code sections and fully formatted mark down sections for documenting and presenting projects.

Basic example showing formatting and code blocks

Key Features

• Interactive code execution.
• Cells: documents are split into “cells” that can contain code, markdown, or raw text.
• Rich output: supports tables, charts, images, LaTeX math, and interactive widgets.
• Mixing code + explanation: perfect for tutorials, experiments, and reports.
• Export options: save as .ipynb (notebook format) or export to HTML, PDF, Markdown.

Benefits

1. Experiment quickly — run small code snippets without restarting the whole script.
2. Readable reports — combine code, results, and documentation in one file.
3. Visualisation-friendly — integrates well with libraries like matplotlib, seaborn, plotly.
4. Reproducible workflows — notebooks can be shared so others can re-run the analysis.
5. Widely supported — used in data science, academia, and industry.

Using Jupyter in VS Code

Prerequisites:

• Python (3.x installed on your system)
• VS Code (latest version)

Inside VS Code:

1. Open Extensions (Ctrl+Shift+X or ⇧⌘X on macOS)
2. Install:
• Python extension (by Microsoft in the Extensions Marketplace)
• Jupyter extension (also by Microsoft)

Install Jupyter Package:

Open / Create a Notebook:

• Open a .ipynb file in VS Code or
• Create a new one:
  File → New File → Jupyter Notebook
  (or create a .ipynb file directly)

Select Your Python Kernel:

At the top right of the notebook editor in VS Code, you’ll see a kernel picker, Choose the Python environment (venv/conda) you want to run code in.

Run cells:

• Each notebook cell has a ▶ Run button (or use Shift+Enter).
• Outputs (text, tables, charts, errors) appear directly below the cell, just like in the browser version.

Markdown

Here is a list of the different formatting options that are available to be used in the mark down sections of the notebooks: