Martin Fowler

A computational notebook is an environment for writing a prose document that allows the author to embed code which can be easily executed with the results also incorporated into the document. It’s a platform particularly well-suited for data science work. Such environments include Jupyter Notebook, R Markdown, Mathematica, and Emacs’s org-mode.

When I’m exploring some data, it’s useful to keep my notes close together with the code that performs the exploration. I like to try some code, look at the results, and note down any observations I have from that execution. A computational notebook allows me to combine these together easily in a single document.

Here’s an example of this, looking at some analysis of my google analytics data for martinfowler.com. I’m doing this in R Studio, which uses the R Markdown format.

The example out here is a graph, as notebooks are well suited for plotting various

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