1. Boey Pak Cheong
pcboey@yahoo.com
http://pytechresources.com
Mini PyCon Malaysia
March 15, 2014

2. What's IPython
● Evolution of the Python Shell
● Vastly improved interactive shell
– Terminal
– Qt-based
● Web Notebook
– Design inspired by scientific environments
● Mathematica, Matlab, IDL

3. What's Ipython (2)
● Interactive testing of threaded GUI toolkits
● Interactive data visualization
● Embeddable interpreter
● Parallel and distributed computing

4. IPython Interactive Architecture

5. ● Decoupled evaluation from REPL env into
own process → kernel
● Several clients can connect to the same
kernel
● Two-process model used by
– ipython console
– ipython qtconsole
– ipython notebook

6. Main Features
● Overview - ?
● Tab completion
● Object introspection
– obj? Obj??
● obj.<TAB> → object attributes
● Search with * wildcard
– %psearch or ?

7. Main Features (2)
● Magic functions
– Overview → %magic
– List all → %lsmagic
● Line magics %
● Cell magics %%

8. Main Features (3)
● %history
– Input and Output
● In[3] , Out[3]
– Last 3 output → _ __ ___
– Last 3 input → i ii iii
● Other magic functions using input history
– %edit, %save, %rerun, %macro

9. Main Features (4)
● System shell access
!<cmd>
var = !<cmd> captures output
● Debugging
– %debug – activate in post-mortem mode
– %pdb

10. Qt Console
● Two-process ZeroMQ , PyQt GUI
● True multi-line editing
● Graphical calltips
● Colors and highlighting
● Inline figures (matplotlib)
● Save/Print

11. IPython Notebook
● Web-based interactive environment
– Text and code cells
– Maths
– Rich media
● Export as python, reStructuredText, LaTeX
or HTML
● Share Notebook files easily
● Data analysis – Visualization

12. The Cast
● Fernando Pérez – project creator and leader
● Robert Kern – work on IPython's core
● Brian Granger - Parallel computing infrastructure,
IPython core
● And many more at
http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/about/credits.html

13. Resources
● http://ipython.org/ - IPython Home Page
● http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/index.html
– Documentation
● https://github.com/ipython/ipython-in-depth
– In-depth 3 hour tutorial, first presented at
PyCon 2012