Coding for data courses

Course materials and notes for data science courses at the London Interdisciplinary School.

This textbook is based on the Berkeley Foundations of Data Science course. The most recent version of the course is at Computational and Inferential Thinking. The repository for the textbook is on Github.

Versions of the Berkeley course come from the last commit in that repository that is licensed with a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license

• 64b20f0. The following commit (710ed4e) relicensed the work with a CC-BY-NC-ND license, forbidding derivative works.

Machinery

The template for this website comes from https://jupyterbook.org - many thanks to the authors.

Getting started for working on the repository

Say your Github username is my-gh-user.

Go to the repository page that houses this README - for example https://github.co/lisds/textbook.

Click on "Fork" button near top right, to make your own fork of the repository, that will now be at https://github.com/my-gh-user/<repo-name> where <repo-name> is the name of the repository housing this README.

The following assumes that the README is in https://github.com/lisds/textbook. The name of the repository is therefore textbook. Substitute URL and repository name throughout.

Clone the main repo:

git clone https://github.com/lisds/textbook

Add a remote for your fork:

cd textbook
git remote add my-gh-user https://github.com/my-gh-user/textbook.git
git fetch my-gh-user

Get any submodules for the repository (you may need these for the build):

git submodule update --init

Install the code modules and build dependencies for this book:

pip install -e .

Start by making some branch to work on, linked to your fork. Use a name to match the kind of changes you are about to make, like rewrite-intro-pages:

git branch rewrite-intro-pages
git checkout rewrite-intro-pages

Associate this branch with your fork:

git push my-gh-user rewrite-intro-pages -u

The -u flag above stores the association of this branch with your fork, referenced by my-gh-user.

Installing stuff for building / serving the repository files

If you use Conda then you might make a Conda environment for working on the repo. I don't, I use pip, and I make a virtual environment. You can do that like this:

python3 -m venv my-venv
source my-virtualenv/bin/activate

Or, if you have virtualenvwrapper (I do) then, you might prefer:

python3 -m venv $WORKON_HOME/my-venv
workon my-venv

Install the Python packages you need for building the site:

pip install -r build_requirements.txt

Finally, check that you can build the pages locally with:

make html

Configuring Jupyter to save / load in R Markdown

I'm using the excellent Jupytext to make it easier to edit Jupyter Notebooks. Jupytext automates saving Notebook files as Markdown (and other formats), and loading them from edited Markdown (and other formats).

You need to configure Jupyter to use it. If you don't have a Jupyter configuration, do:

jupyter notebook --generate-config

You should now have a file ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py. Append these lines:

c.NotebookApp.contents_manager_class = "jupytext.TextFileContentsManager"
c.ContentsManager.default_jupytext_formats = "ipynb,Rmd"

I also turned off autosave globally, by following the instructions in this stackoverflow answer. This stops autosave saving over any edits that I am making in the Markdown source.

Be careful - if you are used to autosave in Jupyter, you can easily lose work when you disable autosave.

mkdir -p ~/.jupyter/custom

Add the following line to ~/.jupyter/custom/custom.js:

Jupyter.notebook.set_autosave_interval(0); // disable autosave

Finally, you may want to clone the original Berkeley textbook:

# Get out of textbook tree
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/data-8/textbook

Make sure you are using the last commit we can legally use, from the Berkeley repository:

cd textbook
# Checkout the last CC-BY-NC commit
git checkout 64b20f0

Extra stuff

Consider installing hub to make interactions with Github easier, from the command line.

Configuring build etc

You might want to check the instructions for configuring the build at https://jupyterbook.org.

Workflow

Developing

• Edit .Rmd and / or .ipynb files
• make html to rebuild .ipynb from more recent .Rmd files, and rebuild .md files from more recent .ipynb files.
• Review in browser

Shipping

• Final check
• Ship with make github