Introduction to Python 3.6 & Jupyter Notebook

Upasana | August 31, 2019 | 3 min read | 84 views

Introduction to Python

Python is a high level interpreted programming language. It was first released in 1991. It is dynamically typed language. Python uses whitespace indentation rather than curly brackets or keywords. Here, we will be setting up python 3.6 on Macbook

Python setup on Macbook

For setting up python 3.6 on Macbook, we will be downloading 64-bit installer of python 3.6 from official python downloads

Follow this link:

https://www.python.org/downloads/mac-osx/

To download, find latest version of python 3.6 and download it.

3.6.8 is the latest version at the time of writing this article:

https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.6.8/python-3.6.8-macosx10.9.pkg

This will download .pkg file and after that click on this file to install python 3.6 on mac OS X.

You will see this pop up when you will click on pkg file, click on continue to install. After clicking continue twice more, you will have to agree to the terms of the software license agreements.

Now you can install python by clicking on the install button

After that, you will have to fill in password on your macbook to install software.

Finally, Python 3.6 should be installed on your macbook. Now, we will verify if it is there or not.

Open terminal and write python3.6 and click enter(return)

You should see similar output for the python version, you had downloaded. If yes, then we are ready and python has been installed on your mac OS.

To exit, use exit() command or click ctrl-D

Create python project

We shall create a python project in which we will be working.

Directory structure

$ cd Documents/
$ mkdir python-app
$ cd python-app

Creating virtual environment

Why do we need virtual environment?

Creating virtual environment has following benefits:

Virtual enironment let you run your project in an isolated environment, which does not affect environment of other projects.
You can freeze the exact dependency versions using requirements.txt, which enables you to replicate the exact environment later on another machine.
You can use multiple versions of python and dependent packages in a project without effecting system version.

Install the virtual environment

$ pip install virtualenv

Create the virtual environment

$ virtualenv -p python3.6 venv

in above command, -p python3.6 will let us specify the python in the environment we are creating and venv is name of the environment which you can change to something else as it pleases.

Now, it will activate virtual environment and will be downloading all required libraries in virtual environment only.

Activate virtual environment

$ source venv/bin/activate

Jupyter notebook setup

Install the Jupyter notebook

$ pip install jupyter notebook

To open, jupyter notebook

$ jupyter notebook

This will open jupyter notebook in default browser set up on the system.

Working in Jupyter notebook

On the jupyter tab, you shall see new button the top right corner. From there, you can create a new notebook.

Now click on Python3 to open a jupyter notebook specific to only python3.

To rename jupyter notebook, click on Untitled

After giving a name, click on Rename to save the new name.

In jupyter notebook, every cell can be of 4 types.

Code
Markdown
Raw NBConvert
Heading

To run cell, you need to click

shift + return(enter)

Default type is always Code and if we want to add notes then we can use Heading to give a heading to the content or the process in the script. Then we can use Markdown for notes. We can use Raw NBConvert when we want to keep code as it but just don’t want to run it.