Читать книгу Algorithms For Dummies - John Paul Mueller, John Mueller Paul, Luca Massaron - Страница 50

IN THIS CHAPTER

Considering what Google Colab provides

Using Google Colab to perform common development tasks

Making applications run in Google Colab

Getting help when you need it

Colaboratory (https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb), or Colab for short, is a Google cloud-based service that lets you write Python code using a notebook-like environment, rather than the usual IDE. (Jupyter Notebook, https://jupyter.org/, provides a similar environment to Colab on the desktop if you don’t have an Internet connection.) You don’t have to install anything on your system to use it. The benefit of this approach is that you can work with code in small pieces and obtain nearly instant results from any work you do. A notebook format also lends itself to output in a report format that works well for presentations and reports. The first section of this chapter helps you work through some Colab basics and understand how Colab differs from a standard IDE (and why this difference has a significant benefit when learning algorithms).

You can use Colab to perform specific tasks in a cell-oriented paradigm. The next sections of the chapter go through a range of task-related topics that start with the use of notebooks. Of course, you also want to perform other sorts of tasks, such as creating various cell types and using them to create notebooks that have a report-like appearance with functional code.

Part of working with Colab is knowing how to run the example code, making it run as quickly as possible. Two sections of the chapter are dedicated to using hardware acceleration and running the example code in various ways.

Finally, this chapter can’t address every aspect of Colab, so the final section of the chapter serves as a handy resource for locating the most reliable information about Colab.

You don’t have to type the source code for this chapter manually. In fact, using the downloadable source is a lot easier. You can find the source for this chapter in the \A4D2E\ A4D2E; 03; Colab Examples.ipynb file of the downloadable source. See the Introduction for details on how to find these source files.