Python Data Science Essentials

Introducing IPython

IPython is a special tool for interactive tasks, which contains special commands that help the developer better understand the code that they are currently writing. These are the commands:

• <object>? and <object>??: This prints a detailed description (with ?? being even more verbose) of the <object>
• %<function>: This uses the special <magic function>

Let's demonstrate the usage of these commands with an example. We first start the interactive console with the ipython command that is used to run IPython, as shown here:

$> ipython
Python 2.7.6 (default, Sep  9 2014, 15:04:36)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
IPython 2.3.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
? -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features. ...