Jupyter Overview

The Jupyter Notebook App is a server - client application that allows editing and running notebook documents via a web browser. The Jupyter Notebook App can be executed on a local desktop requiring no internal access or can be installed on a remote server and accessed through the internet.

In addition to displaying/editing/running notebook documents, the Jupyter Notebook App has a “Dashboard”, a “control panel” showing local files and allowing to open notebook documents or shutting down their kernels.

Notebook document

Notebook documents are documents produced by the Jupyter Notebook App, which contain both computer code (e.g. python) and rich text elements (paragraph, equations, figures, links, etc.). Notebook documents can contain the analysis description and the results (figures, tables, etc..) as well as executable documents which can be run to perform data analysis.

Kernel

A notebook kernel is a “computational engine” that executes the code contained in a Notebook document. The ipython kernel, executes python code. Kernels for many other languages exist (official kernels).

When you open a Notebook document, the associated kernel is automatically launched. When the notebook is executed (either cell-by-cell or with menu Cell -> Run All), the kernel performs the computation and produces the results.

Notebook Dahboard

The Notebook Dashboard is the component which is shown first when you launch Jupyter Notebook App. The Notebook Dashboard is mainly used to open notebook documents, and to manage the running kernels (visualize and shutdown).

The Notebook Dashboard has other features similar to a file manager, namely navigating folders and renaming/deleting files.