What’s a data science notebook?

Imagine you’re a data scientist, and you need to pull in some data about your user churn and analyze it.

Data Science notebooks – or just “code notebooks” – help you go from this blob of code:

To this nicely formatted, iterative, visual set of code blocks:

Pretty much every data scientist I know uses notebooks, including yours truly (does one know oneself? I can’t understand Hegel). This post will walk you through what code notebooks are, why so many data teams and developers use them, and how they work.