A popular means of using pandas is through the use of IPython Notebooks. IPython Notebooks provide a web-based interactive computational environment, allowing the combination of code, text, mathematics, plots, and right media into a web-based document. IPython Notebooks run in a browser and contain Python code that is run in a local or server-side Python session that the notebooks communicate with using WebSockets. Notebooks can also contain markup code and rich media content, and can be converted to other formats such as PDF, HTML, and slide shows.
The following is an example of an IPython Notebook from the IPython website (http://ipython.org/notebook.html) that demonstrates the rich capabilities of notebooks:
IPython Notebooks are not strictly required for using pandas and can be installed into your development environment independently or alongside of pandas. During the course of this this book, we will install pandas and an IPython Notebook server. You will be able to perform code examples in the text directly in an IPython console interpreter, and the examples will be packaged as notebooks that can be run with a local notebook server. Additionally, the workbooks will be available online for easy and immediate access at https://wakari.io/sharing/bundle/LearningPandas/LearningPandas_Index.
Note
To learn more about IPython Notebooks, visit the notebooks site at http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/notebook/, and for more in-depth coverage, refer to another book, Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization, Cyrille Rossant, Packt Publishing.