Pluto notebooks

Published

January 4, 2025

You’ll find plenty of sources to learn about Pluto notebooks online: plutojl.org has lots of material to get you started.

A few key points to highlight:

You work with Pluto notebooks in a web browser.
Pluto notebooks are organized in cells.
Pluto notebooks are written in Julia. Each cell is a Julia expression.
Pluto notebooks are reactive. When you change any cell, all cells that depend on it automatically update.

This design makes Pluto a good fit for exploratory scholarship. The notebooks are valid Julia scripts in plain-text format, so they’re easy to manage with a version control system like git, and easy to share. Pluto notebooks have no technical prerequisites beyond the Julia language and the Pluto package, so it’s easy to run them and reproduce their functionality. The PlutoUI package gives you a selection of widgets for user interaction with a notebook, so it’s easy to invite experimenting with different parameters, and immediately seeing the result of any changes you make.