Glossary

Every term the syllabus and setup pages use, one plain sentence each. If a word on this site confuses you and is not here, tell a TA — that is a bug in this page, not in you.

Clone — making your own local copy of a repository from GitHub (git clone <url>); after that, everything you do happens in your copy.

Command line — typing instructions to the computer as text, one line at a time, instead of clicking.

Dataframe — a table of data (rows and columns) held in Python by the pandas package, like a spreadsheet your code can inspect and transform.

Commit — a saved snapshot of your project at one moment, with a short note; Git keeps all of them so you can look back or go back.

Environment — one project’s private set of Python + packages, kept in its .venv/ folder so projects can’t interfere with each other.

Git — the tool that tracks what changed in your project and lets you save and restore snapshots (commits).

Git Bash — a terminal for Windows that understands the same commands as the macOS/Linux terminal, so the whole class speaks one command language.

Interpreter — the actual Python program (one file on your disk) that reads your code and runs it; your machine may have several, which is why “which Python?” matters.

JupyterLab — a notebook editor that runs in your browser. You will see it referred to elsewhere; this course uses VS Code for notebooks and does not set JupyterLab up. Typing uv run jupyter lab in a course project will either fail or start some other JupyterLab that is already on your machine, on a kernel that is not the project’s — which is the failure Block 4 is about.

Kernel — the live Python process that runs your notebook’s cells and remembers your variables between runs.

Lab checkpoint — the Moodle slot where you upload your diagnosis note at the end of each lab, with one line saying who you explained it to and what you need help with. A lab is complete when it is in; labs carry no points.

Lock file (uv.lock) — the exact list of every package version a project uses, so uv sync builds the identical environment on any machine.

Notebook (.ipynb file) — a document that mixes runnable code cells with their outputs and text; convenient for exploration, and the reason “run order” and “kernel state” matter.

Package — code someone else wrote (like pandas) that gets installed into an environment so your code can import it.

Python — the programming language this program is taught in — and also shorthand for the interpreter that runs it, which is why “which Python?” is a real question.

Path — the address of a file in the folder tree, written like data/raw/sales.csv; relative paths start from the working directory.

Prompt — the line the terminal prints when it is waiting for you to type a command.

Repository (repo) — a project folder that Git is tracking; cloning a repo copies it, history included, to your machine.

Shell — the program inside the terminal window that reads your commands and runs them (bash or zsh here).

Terminal — the window you type commands into; not a different computer, just a precise way to talk to yours.

Traceback — Python’s error report: the chain of calls that led to a failure, with the error type on the last line.

uv — the tool that gets each project the right Python and the right packages; uv sync sets a project up, uv run runs things inside its environment.

.venv/ — the folder inside a project where its environment lives (its own interpreter and packages); uv sync creates it, you never edit it, and deleting it is safe because uv sync rebuilds it.

VS Code — the program’s standard code editor; you open the whole project folder in it, and it runs your notebooks (after you pick the .venv kernel) and gives you a terminal in the right place.

Working directory (cwd) — the folder a program is “standing in”; every relative path is resolved from there. First thing to check when a file can’t be found.