[IPython-dev] The cat's out of the bag: ipython notebooks spotted in the wild...

[Fernando Perez]

Hi folks,

we haven't made much noise on-list about it, but those who were at
euroscipy witnessed my enthusiasm about it  :)  And we know that a few
of you are already using the notebooks, and even sending pull
requests.  If you are curious, recently a couple of mentions/reviews
have been made:

- A thorough look with critical feedback by Anne Archibald:
http://lighthouseinthesky.blogspot.com/2011/09/review-ipython-notebooks.html

- Wes McKinney (of pandas fame) using them for a talk and actually
providing the real notebooks for you to follow along:
http://wesmckinney.com/blog/?p=202.  I'm really thrilled to see this:
we'd love the notebooks to become a natural way for users to exchange
complex computational sessions in their daily work, and Wes is
starting the tradition by making his talk slides available next to his
notebooks.

While this is something we've all wanted and on which recently the
core team has put a lot of work, it's important to highlight that the
lion's share of the credit goes to Brian, who went into silent
mad-hacking mode for a few weeks around the 0.11 release timeframe and
emerged from his den with a fully functional notebook branch.  It's
also an excellent illustration of how the work we've done since early
last year on our zmq/messaging architecture is now paying major
dividends, as this runs on the exact same machinery (in fact, my
preferred mode of usage is to keep a qt console connected to my
notebook kernel for  a nicer help viewer, additional quick
experimentation that doesn't mess up my document, etc).

If you'd like to start playing with the toys, and giving us feedback
(much preferred if it comes in the form of a pull request :), the
installation instructions are here:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/install/install.html#dependencies-for-the-ipython-html-notebook

a quick overview is here:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook.html

and you should note that the docs ship with a directory full of
notebook examples:

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/tree/master/docs/examples/notebooks

Cheers,

f