Introducing PixieDust

Tip

Fun fact

I am often asked how I came up with the name PixieDust, for which I answer that I simply wanted to make Notebook simple, as in magical, for non-data scientists.

PixieDust (https://github.com/ibm-watson-data-lab/pixiedust) is an open-source project composed primarily of three components designed to address the three goals stated at the beginning of this chapter:

• A helper Python library for Jupyter Notebooks that provides simple APIs to load data from various sources into popular frameworks, such as pandas and Apache Spark DataFrame, and then to visualize and explore the dataset interactively.
• A simple Python-based programming model that enables developers to "productize" the analytics directly into the Notebook by creating powerful dashboards called PixieApps. As we'll see in the next chapters, PixieApps are different from traditional BI (short for, Business Intelligence) dashboards because developers can directly use HTML and...