Lab Hour 1: Tutorial on Terminal and iPython

Lab Hour 1: Tutorial on Terminal and iPython

Friday 8 April 2016

Install Anaconda, which will provide you with all the Python packages you will need for many Stanford courses. These packages include numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and jupyter (iPython notebooks).

Some example files to play around with can be found here. These files are from a real dataset, which is publicly available here.

A tutorial on working in the Terminal can be found here.

A tutorial on working in iPython can be downloaded here. You can start the notebook by going to Terminal, navigating to the directory containing the newly downloaded \(\texttt{ipython_basics.ipynb}\), and executing the command

ipython notebook

, which opens the jupyter home directory in your browser. Double-click the notebook to get started.

You can convert the notebook to a basic python script using the command:

ipython nbconvert --to PYTHON

One thing we did not cover in detail were NumPy and SciPy. We highly recommend going through this tutorial for getting up to speed.