Introduction to Jupyter

This introduction is a summary of the contents of this article.

What Is A Jupyter Notebook?

Here, "notebook" or "notebook documents" denote documents that contain both code and rich text elements, such as figures, links, equations, ...
"Jupyter" is a loose acronym meaning Julia, Python, and R. These programming languages were the first target languages of the Jupyter application.
The main components of the whole environment are, on the one hand, the notebooks themselves and the application.
On the other hand, you also have a notebook kernel and a notebook dashboard.

What Is The Jupyter Notebook App?

As a server-client application, the Jupyter Notebook App allows you to edit and run your notebooks via a web browser.
The application can be executed on a PC without Internet access or it can be installed on a remote server, where you can access it through the Internet.
Its two main components are the kernels and a dashboard.
A kernel is a program that runs and introspects the user's code.
The Jupyter Notebook App has a kernel for Python code, but there are also kernels available for other programming languages.
The dashboard of the application not only shows you the notebook documents that you have made and can reopen but can also be used to manage the kernels.

How To Install Jupyter Notebook?

One of the requirements here is Python, either Python 3.3 or greater or Python 2.7.
The general recommendation is that you use the Anaconda distribution to install both Python and the notebook application.
The advantage of Anaconda is that you have access to over 720 packages that can easily be installed with Anaconda's conda, a package, dependency, and environment manager.
You can download and follow the instructions for the installation of Anaconda here.
You can always read up on the Jupyter installation instructions here.

How To Use Jupyter Notebooks?

Run the following command to open up the application:

jupyter notebook

Then you'll see the application opening in the web browser on the following address:

http://localhost:8888/

What to do if I have to enter a token?

When token authentication is enabled (on by default), the notebook uses a token to authenticate requests. The token is displayed in your terminal or console (where you have entered "jupyter notebook" before) and is given by a long sequence of letters and numbers, e.g. "abc123abc123". You can either copy and paste the token or open the following url in your web browser

http://localhost:8888/?token=abc123abc123

You can find further information on that here .