Computing Basics

By using this Jupyter Notebook, you’re encountering quite a few different elements of coding. Here are a few useful things to know.

Software Development Kits

In this notebook, we’re interacting with the Allen Institute’s Software Development Kit (SDK). SDKs provide a set of tools, libraries, documentation, code samples, processes, and or guides that allow developers to create software applications. The AllenSDK is really useful because it enables us to interact with their raw data as well as any computed metrics they’ve already created.

Python

Python is a coding language that is widely used in research, data science, and more. You might use Python in a distribution such as Anaconda. Distributions such as this are useful because they contain various tools to help you code as well as many pre-installed coding packages.

Jupyter Notebooks

Jupyter Notebooks are great ways to collaborate on coding projects and learn how to code. Usefully, they contain both markdown (helpful text describing what is happening in the notebook) and blocks of code. If you’ve never used a Jupyter Notebook before, I’d recommend starting with the Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks, otherwise, feel free to move on to the Cell Types Notebook.

There is also a full tutorial here.

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