IPython Notebooks are a web server-based interactive environment that combine Python code execution, text, mathematics, plots, and rich media into a single document, along with automatic persistence of code and an easy means of deploying code to the Web. You can find more details on the IPython Notebook site at http://ipython.org/notebook.html.

IPython Notebooks are an exceptional way to learn both Python and pandas. This book will neither assume the use of IPython Notebooks, nor teach their usage beyond the brief examples given in this section. However, the code provided with the book are IPython Notebook files, so demonstrating how to run the server provided by Anaconda is worth a few paragraphs of explanation.

The IPython Notebook server can be started with the following shell command (the same on all platforms):

ipython notebook

You will get a small amount of output on the console:

elheydt/.ipython/profile_default'
2014-12-06 21:36:11.547 [NotebookApp...