I’ve recently been getting to know the Jupyter Notebook environment. It’s a very convenient development environment for many languages, but is well-known as the evolution of the iPython Notebook.
Jupyter works by starting a server on your own computer to execute python (or another language) code. The notebook is rendered in a web browser and consists of cells of code. Cells can be run individually, which sends the code to the Jupyter server on your computer. The results (text, plots or error messages) are sent back to the browser and displayed directly below the code cell. Additionally, the Python instance on the server stores the variables created, so they can be used again in another cell.
Alternatively, you can access a remote server which is set up for Jupyter Notebook use, such as at try.jupyter.org.
The benefits of Jupyter over, let’s say, Sublime/cmd, are convenience and presentation style. The Jupyter Notebook, because of the cell architecture, makes it easy to run one small piece of code at a time. This makes debugging much faster & more streamlined, as it’s easy to check intermediate variable values, types and so on. Further, it’s very easy to share your work, for example on nbviewer.jupyter.org, and it looks good too, with all plots rendered on page.
On the other hand, Jupyter Notebook is not really in the same category with ‘fully featured’ Python IDEs like PyDev or PyCharm. For one thing, the output is not a .py file, but a .ipynb file, which which is actually a text file holding the code and output in a JSON array. Development of python packages or applications is thus not really possible or expected in Jupyter. On the other hand, demonstration of existing packages and data analysis is the main point and expected use of Jupyter.
Check out my Jupyter Notebooks:
Beyond Data Science 