Lectures

The class material includes Jupyter-based notebooks for use during class.

You can view them here, or open them to interact. You can use any environment for your local development environment, or use the SDSU’s JupyterHub on the Instructional Cluster to experiment and develop without a local install. If you have never logged-in before, check SDSU’s Research & Cyberinfrastructure resources for students. Once you are on the Instructional Cluster page, simply click on the Launch JupyterHub button.

If you decide to use SDSU’s Instructional Cluster’s JupyterHub, you can download each individual notebook from the class repository, under the lectures section on your machine, and once opened Jupyter on SDSU’s JupyterHub you can select Upload Files and upload the desired notebook in the web app to interact with.

Environment¶

This explains how I configure my environment so you can experiment with the slides locally, or adapt these tools for your own use.

Install Required Packages¶

First of all, download and install Julia, Long-term support (LTS) release is recommended.

Moreover, to interact with the notebooks, you want to install JupyterLab (new, richer ecosystem), via

pip install jupyterlab

Once installed, launch JupyterLab with:

jupyter lab

and selcet the Notebook app.

You can also only install the classic Jupyter Notebook standalone app via

pip install notebook

and to run the notebook type:

jupyter notebook

And for these (using Julia in Jupyter) you can run

julia -e 'import Pkg; Pkg.add("IJulia")'

from your terminal, or first start a Julia session with

julia

and then type:

]add IJulia

go back to your Julia REPL using backspace and type

julia> using IJulia

and then

julia> notebook()

to run the notebook.

Additional resources¶

You can open these notebooks as normal notebooks (continuous scroll). If you wish to use them as slides, one useful package is

• RISE: General editing and presentation of slides

  • Alt-R: Snap in and out of presentation mode

  • Shift-I: toggle slides

  • Shift-G: toggle fragment (incrementally revealed cells)

Best practices¶

• When saving, use Kernel -> Restart & Clear Output to keep the stored data and diffs in the notebook small.

• For your images, several formats will do. Just keep in mind that PDF files are not web-friendly. PDF images can be converted to SVG using pdf2svg, and the result will still look sharp (unlike PNG) no matter the scale or zoom.

IDEs or editors¶

We mentioned Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) briefly in class. These are very fancy “editors”. Strictly speaking, you can modify code with any text editor. You don’t necessarily need to use an IDE. But using an IDE might make your like a lot easier and can help boost your productivity.

An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. But they can also have nice features like syntax highliting, code completion, refactoring, code search, and language support, just to name a few.

One of the most popular IDEs at the moment is VSCode.

VSCode supports many different “plug-ins” or extensions that can facilitate your work. One of the most useful one, if you want to collaborate live with others, is the LiveShare extension. LiveShare enables you to quickly collaborate in real time with a friend, classmate, or professor on the same code without the need to sync code or to configure the same development tools, settings, or environment.

For this course, I also recommend at least the GitLens, the Julia, and the Jupyter extension; but you may find other extensions useful.