Please click on setup_python.md to read instructions for setting up your laptop for this workshop
The recommended review is in a notebook format to get you familiar with it since the rest of the sessions will use the notebook a lot. But if you have trouble getting it to work, there isn't much interaction so you can just view it by clicking on review.ipynb above. If Github doesn't seem to render this properly, copy and paste the notebook's URL, https://github.com/henry-ngo/mcmc_workshop/blob/master/Session0/review.ipynb into the online Jupyter notebook viewer: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/
Note: If you have experience with git, you can clone this repository to get all the files. If not, you can just use the file tree above to get to any file you need and then view them on the Github website or download them to your computer.
Read below for more on using Jupyter notebooks
Many files in this repository have the .ipynb extension and are known as Jupyter Notebooks (or iPython notebooks, to use the old name). These are interactive notebooks that allow you to see the code, run snippets and see the results. On the Github website, clicking on the file just shows you a static HTML rendering (no interaction). To get the full experience, you must download them and then open them with your notebook interface. It's easiest if you first navigate to the Session0 directory in your Terminal then run
jupyter notebook
I found that for some reason, on my machine, I sometimes get an error about importing dateutil.tz. I am not sure why it happens but when I try:
ipython notebook
it works after a redirect from ipython to Jupyter. ipython will soon be deprecated in favour of Jupyter but this seems to be a good workaround for now. I will update this space when I figure out what the problem is.
After setting up your environment as per the first section, this command should a directory tree in your web browser. You can then navigate around and click on an existing notebook file or create a new one. Within the notebook file, each cell can be code or text formatted in the Markdown language, and you can "run" each cell by pressing Shift and Enter while selecting that cell. If you don't want to run notebooks or if you can't get it to work, you can also type the lines into your own python code.
Here is a page showing some basics for using these notebooks: https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/Notebook/Notebook%20Basics.html
Finally, a shortcut if you want to just open a notebook file directly, you can type jupyter notebook <filename>