Algorithms For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Working with Google Colab

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 ...