Google Colab and Why You Should Use It (2024)

The world of Data Science is full of infinite features and technologies, it is almost impossible to learn every single one of them, many beginners in the world of data science are discouraged by the amount of stacks and tools available in the market. Even experienced Data Scientist some times don’t know which tool exactly to use, many of them don’t even know Google Colab, a simple but powerful option for your notebooks.

Okay, but what is Colab? According to Google:

“Colab is a product from Google Research, it allows anybody to write and execute arbitrary python code through the browser, and is especially well suited to machine learning, data analysis and education. More technically, Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that requires no setup to use, while providing free access to computing resources including GPUs.”

All you need to have in order to use it is internet and a Gmail account, since codes are saved in Google Drive. It makes life way easier than using and IDE, of course that there are moments in which Colab isn’t appropriate, like when you are Web Scrapping, but for Data Visualization and documenting your code it is the best option.

You might be thinking: “It sounds cool, however I need to use the terminal” and that’s where it gets even more exciting, by adding an exclamation point (!) you can use it just like you would in Linux or MacOS. Example:

!pip install scrapy

You might be amazed with how cool this is, wait until you get to try the snippets and all the modules already installed in Colab, by the ways the majority of the most important data science technologies are already installed in it, like Pandas and Numpy.

Here are four examples of Colab Notebooks I highly encourage you to take a look:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/examples/blob/master/courses/udacity_intro_to_tensorflow_for_deep_learning/l01c01_introduction_to_colab_and_python.ipynb?hl=en

https://colab.research.google.com/github/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook/blob/master/notebooks/Index.ipynb

https://colab.research.google.com/github/carlosfab/data_science/blob/master/Detec%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_Fraude_em_Cart%C3%B5es_de_Cr%C3%A9dito.ipynb

https://colab.research.google.com/github/carlosfab/data_science/blob/master/Machine_Learning_para_a_Detec%C3%A7%C3%A3o_do_C%C3%A2ncer_de_Mama.ipynb

Here is a video by Google for you to take a look:

I hope you enjoyed it, Google Colab is the future of Data Science, keeping up with your code, organization, visualization and storytelling has never been so easy as it is nowadays.

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References:

Image from: Minor, Jack. “How to Download Files from Google Colab.” Honchō, 8 Sept. 2020, www.honchosearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-download-files-from-google-colab/.

“Jupyter on the Web with Colab.” Performance by Yufeng, YouTube, 29 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIc9z-Ad3k.