Best way to learn python through jupyter

The Sandbox Software/Technology
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Greetings. Through the anaconda prompt, we use jupyter at my place of employment for doing python.

Anyone have any recommended tutorials for learning python through jupyter?

I’m a little concerned this isn’t a base python program, and so tutorials won’t be appropriate for jupyter.

I’m also embarrassed in general about not knowing where to start.

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I don’t think Jupyter is a good place to start. You should probably start with writing actual Python programs and not .ipynb files. You’ll miss out on core introductory topics like how module imports work.

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Learning Python is the same (more or less) whether it’s in Jupyter or some other IDE. Jupyter just has the advantage of inherent code segmenting and a more sophisticated means of documenting both the code and the purpose of the Jupyter Notebook.

WRT using Jupyter, each “cell” is somewhat independent of each other. But once you execute code in one cell, its results remain in memory. So running a cell toward the “bottom” of the Notebook first will have an impact on running code in an “earlier” cell later on; unless you restart the kernel.

One question that will help you with the question: What exactly do you want to do?

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I don’t like notebooks (by Joel Grus)

slides only:

But seriously, notebooks may be just fine for you to learn & do what you need to do, if you’re just doing straightforward number-crunching. If you were going to learn python to do computer science-y things (sorting algorithms, hash tables, etc), then no. Don’t use notebooks. But if you’re going to use it similar to R, why not.

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I’ve never been fond of notebook-style coding, so my main takeaways from watching the first part of that video are that I somehow managed to miss both

  • the release of Visual Studio Code, and
  • the addition of type hints to Python 3

for over five years. I feel so ashamed.

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Not jupyter related (since it’s by Joel Grus, who meep already established as not liking notebooks), but a fun Python-related watch. I suspect it will be inscrutable if you’re not already acquainted with backprop learning for feedforward neural nets, but I found it interesting to watch how he structured his library and what python language functionality he used:

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Here are a bunch of jupyter notebooks to learn simulation in python:
https://allendowney.github.io/ModSimPy/index.html

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But notebooks are bad!

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To quote myself.