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Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see this start to happen in the academic world too. Being able to play around with a very complicated algorithm you are trying to wrap your head around would be a godsend.

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There are some awesome notebooks out that demonstrate exactly that. Here are a couple of good links with combinatorial optimization and TSP:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/fonnesbeck/B...

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/TSPv3.ipy...

This is the first I've looked into IPython Notebook, so apologies for the newbie question: Is a notebook an html page with Python code snippets interspersed? Are these supposed to be interactive at all? Or do you have to copy the Python locally, then install some packages before you can finally run it?

I guess I'm asking, what's the difference between an HTML page that shows a Python implementation of an algorithm vs those links? Or what's the appeal?

I'm certain IPython Notebooks are valuable, since everybody seems to love them. It's not clear from glancing at those examples what the big deal is, though, so I thought I should ask in case more newbies come along and incorrectly conclude that there's nothing especially interesting about those examples beyond their content. (To be clear, the content is excellent, but why is IPython Notebook to thank rather than the author? Could those examples not have been done via some other method, or is the purpose of IPython Notebook just to make it really easy to generate such pages?)

The IPython Notebook is part of the IPython interactive computing environment[1]. You must to install IPython locally(or in the cloud) and run the notebook web server to load and execute the notebook's code live in the browser. These are static HTML representations of the notebooks, think of them as previews, but you can download the JSON .ipynb file and load it up in your IPython Notebook environment and execute the code.

The benefit of the IPython Notebook is sharable JSON file and interactive REPL-like environment that blends code, results, and narrative prose.

[1] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/interactive/notebook.h...

edit: I should have refreshed the page before I wrote this redundant reply.

The links that you're viewing are "read-only" version of the notebooks. The great thing about them if you install IPython Notebook and "run" them is that you are able to read the content, and then when you encounter code, you execute it interactively - kind of like Mathematica if you've ever used that?

There are some videos that show this in action. One that I put together is here if you'd like to see a quick demo of it as it (rather generically) relates to Mining the Social Web - https://vimeo.com/72871930

The nbviewer links are just HTML pages, but if you were running your own IPython notebook server, it would be the actual python interpreter running your live code!

Setting up that IPython notebook server is easy: check out this 2 min video (http://vimeo.com/72383764). Bonus: if you use the one provided in github in that link, it comes with all the python imports you'd already need like networkx, response, etc. :)

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