IPython on The Carpentries

Fourteen and Counting - People's Favorite Tools

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thank you to all the people who have sent in short posts about their favourite tools. We are up to fourteen now, and the variety of tools is great to see. Finding out what other people use - and possibly more importantly - why they use it, and for what, is a great shortcut for researchers. There are a bewildering number of research tools around. Getting a tip from someone in your discipline, or from someone who is doing a similar task to you, can really help.

People's Favorite Tools

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A big thank you to everyone who has responded so far to the call for short posts about their favourite tools.

So far we have had Paula Martinez on R, with Bianca Peterson enthusiastically seconding, Jeff Oliver sharing his love of Git and GitHub, Kellie Ottoboni talking up IPython, and Thomas Arildsen on how the Jupyter Notebook facilitates his teaching. Juliane Schneider weighed in on the wonders of OpenRefine. Clifton Franklund likes RStudio, while Francesco Montanari is a fan of emacs.

My Favourite Tool: Jupyter Notebook

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My favorite tool is … the Jupyter Notebook.

One of my favourite tools is the Jupyter notebook. I use it for teaching my students scientific computing with Python.

Why I like it:

Using Jupyter with the plugin RISE, I can create presentations including code cells that I can edit and execute live during the presentation to demonstrate the various aspects of Python that I introduce. It is a very good compromise between running scripts and typing in the command prompt on the projector screen vs. just showing static slides with code.

My Favourite Tool: IPython

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My favorite tool is … IPython.

IPython is a Python interpreter with added features that make it an invaluable tool for interactive coding and data exploration. IPython is most commonly taught via the Jupyter notebook, an interactive web-based tool for evaluating code, but IPython can be used on its own directly in the terminal as a replacement for the standard Python interpreter.

Why I like it

You can run Unix commands directly in IPython. For instance, if you want to load a file from another directory, it is convenient to cd into the directory from within the IPython window.