Hey Roy,

I haven't been _working_ with it, but coincidentally just viewed a webinar on it with some other programmers here, and I agree it's pretty cool.

The webinar (I think it's freely viewable):
'Data Science Experiments with Twitter and IPython Notebook'
<http://oreillynet.com/pub/e/2984>

> ...But perhaps the killer bit is the idea of "Notebooks" that can capture all of your work in a way that is also editable and completely web-ready...

It was pretty amazing to install it, fire it up, see a browser auto-open, type some python in & hit return -- and then open a second browser, access the same url, see the input code and its output -- and then, from the second browser be able to add & run code... that the first browser could then see, too. (I agree, hard to explain.)

-b
---
Birkin James Diana
Programmer, Digital Technologies
Brown University Library
[log in to unmask]


On Dec 19, 2013, at 12:48 PM, Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Our Wikipedian in Residence, Max Klein brought iPython [1] to my attention
> recently and even in just the little exploration I've done with it so far
> I'm quite impressed. Although you could call it "interactive Python" that
> doesn't begin to put across the full range of capabilities, as when I first
> heard that I thought "Great, a Python shell where you enter a command, hit
> the return, and it executes. Great. Just what I need. NOT." But I was SO
> WRONG.
> 
> It certainly can and does do that, but also so much more. You can enter
> blocks of code that then execute. Those blocks don't even have to be
> Python. They can be Ruby or Perl or bash. There are built-in functions of
> various kinds that it (oddly) calls "magic". But perhaps the killer bit is
> the idea of "Notebooks" that can capture all of your work in a way that is
> also editable and completely web-ready. This last part is probably
> difficult to understand until you experience it.
> 
> Anyway, i was curious if others have been working with it and if so, what
> they are using it for. I can think of all kinds of things I might want to
> do with it, but hearing from others can inspire me further, I'm sure.
> Thanks,
> Roy
> 
> [1] http://ipython.org/