Greetings to all,
How do I (in general) download the course Jupyter Notebooks? In particular as a .Tex file?
Have you clicked the “File” menu within the notebook? There is a “File → Download” option that allows you to choose lots of download formats, including “TeX”. I have not tried downloading a notebook as LaTeX, but I use the “as notebook (ipynb)” option. On some browsers you may find that the file downloads with the extension “.json”. The notebooks are JSON files, but you would need to rename it to the extension “.ipynb” if you ever want to upload the file and use it again.
If you are planning to save copies of your work as a “backup” in case Coursera ever deletes your work (not a bad idea), you probably should use the “as notebook” option. If you download it as PDF or LaTeX, I think that would probably only be useful for printing.
You can also download and save all the files associated with the notebook by using the instructions here.
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“If you are planning to save copies of your work as a “backup” in case Coursera ever deletes your work (not a bad idea)”, you read my mind: this is indeed what I am trying to do. However, “download as” a .tex file worked fine in Week 3, but didn’t in Week 4. I also tried the print option (Clrt + p) but it always gives me a one page to print (not all the notebook) :(.
I am trying to figure out a way to keep these Notebooks as pdf files in my computer, and probably if the course team provides pdf files in the future, it would be perfect.
I just figured out a way. I “download as” a ipynb file (as the browser forces to), then copy what’s inside the file and paste to my “TexMaker” application in my computer. It worked fine (despite the generated pdf file wasn’t that “good”).
If you are trying to keep a backup of your work, I don’t understand why you would want any other format than “.ipynb”. Other formats are only useful for reading, not for uploading, right? And you can setup the software to run Jupyter notebooks locally or you can upload them to Google Colab and run them there. Well, you’d need to figure out how to upload all the associated files. But you could at least view your work and “copy/paste” from it back to Coursera if you run the notebook on Colab.
But as I mentioned, the “File → Download” function allows you to download as a LaTeX file. Did you try that? You get a zip file that contains the LaTeX file. I didn’t try doing anything with the .tex file. The “Download” option also supports “as pdf” as one of the options. If you only care about being able to see your work locally as a reference, maybe the direct PDF option would be useful. Mind you, I have not tried that because I fundamentally need the “.ipynb” format for my purposes as backup.
Yep, Tex format is for reading and I want to keep pdf files on my machine because I may need them in the future. Why is that? In fact, I got a financial assistance for this course and as far as I know, I will lose access to the assignments’ contents just after six months from the time the assistance was approved! Yes? No? If this will happen, I already have everything kept in my machine.
In all cases, I tried to “download as” .tex but didn’t work (as I mentioned above), but doesn’t matter as I figured out a way to do so.
On the other hand, I want to tell you that I learnt a lot from your replies about backups and so on. So thank you.
Yes, it is true that as soon as you stop paying or as soon as your Financial Aid stops, you will lose access to the assignments on the website. This is mentioned on the FAQ Thread. It is an excellent idea to save copies so that you can later refer to them. If you do as you described and download as “ipynb” and then convert those to PDF or TeX you should be covered. I would recommend saving both formats. As I mentioned, the “ipynb” files are actually executable either in your own Jupyter environment or on Google Colab or other such environments. Also note that if you really want to execute the notebooks locally, you’ll need to save copies of all the other files (data files, additional python support routines and so forth).
" Also note that if you really want to execute the notebooks locally, you’ll need to save copies of all the other files (data files, additional python support routines and so forth)", this is exactly my whole idea. I am thinking of suggesting to the course team that they provide a downloadable file that contains all files of every particular assignment. I see this is a good way to improve the course which is already very good in my opinion.
I want to mention BTW that in Andrew Ng’s machine learning course (that of Stanford), everything is downloadable to the machine and is tested in the machine.
Yes, I was a mentor for Stanford Machine Learning for a few years as well, so I am familiar with how things worked over there. But remember all the hassles with how to get Octave or MATLAB installed and properly configured on your system. Those are non-trivial issues and just provide more “friction” in the process. That’s why the Jupyter notebooks are a step forward: the entire course environment is web based and does not depend on the user’s environment other than having a reasonable browser. You can even use the course from a tablet, not a real computer. If you want to run things locally, you can, but then you will deal with all the issues of getting things set up on your local system in a way that is compatible. I completely understand why the course staff does not want to get involved in that. My prediction is that they will politely decline your request to go down that path.
More recent update: they have provided an easy way to download all the files in a given assignment. Please see this thread. But note that getting the assignments to run locally is not a simple matter and requires a lot of software to be installed. Here’s a thread about how to get started down that road. And here is a thread about how to run the notebook on Google Colab.
As you say then. Having discussions with you is fruitful and save a lot of time for students! Thank you.
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I’m another who really likes to print out assignments to study them, and the problem (reported in the bug tracker) that the simple “print” facility just prints one page is very frustrating.
My recipe is that if I download as a notebook, and open that notebook in a local Jupyter (not the Coursera environment) then it will print successfully. Of course the local environment may not have the correct modules/versions to run, and you usually need to download the images as well so that they will appear correctly and print.
As I mentioned, this has been reported to the DLAI staff, but the fact that the notebook print behavior is different in a local Jupyter and in the Coursera environment may mean that it “falls between cracks”. Coursera and DLAI are two separate organizations.
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I believe that if the course staff provide an (optional) downloadable file (for those who want it) in which we can find all the files there (pdf to read, datasets, codes…), then that would be of great benefit to some students. For instance, perhaps someone want to build a new classifier on a new dataset of his choice, perhaps play with codes or modify them and so on…
I do not know if it’s acceptable to talk about other platforms, but when I had that course about machine learning with python, they always provide a .zip file where everything is there so that students can locally test in their machines.
You have tar available in the Docker images, although they did not provide zip the last time I looked. You can either add a cell to the notebook with a “bang escape” to run the tar as a shell command or you can click “File → Open” and then “New → Terminal” to get a linux shell from which you can do that. It’s just my guess, but I think the course staff has decided not to encourage people to download the code. It presents “terms of use” issues and it’s just a level of complexity that buys them nothing to deal with. Well, in point of fact, they won’t deal with it in any case and the support will fall to the mentors. Did I mention we don’t get paid to do this? 
If you want to play these games, you need to develop your own skills to be able to succeed at it. Just giving you a zip file is only the first step. How do you install it? What other packages do you need installed locally and what versions thereof do you need in order to make it work? What if you’re on some old version of Windows? It just never ends, right?
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They don’t pay anything despite the support you provide to students?!!
…
On the other hand, you are totally right about how to play these games, I will seriously take your advice and go with it (+ I shall also buy you a cup of coffee 
).
Before, I didn’t know what a"mentor" is (as I am not a native speaker), but just after your precious replies, I googled this word, and they say, a mentor is “an experienced and trusted adviser”. Well, it is exactly what I found here. So, a big THANK YOU @paulinpaloalto (and all the other mentors).
The good news is that there is a huge amount of helpful information on the Internet about any topic related to how to do things with software. Google (or whatever your preferred search engine is) can do “NLP” these days, so just type your question directly as a search. For example “How do I unpack a tar file on Windows”.
There are also some threads here on the forum that explore some of the things you’ll need. This is a more advanced topic, but you may eventually need to know about Anaconda so I’ll bookmark this thread here.
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Thank you @paulinpaloalto.
Muy buenas sus respuestas nos ayudan mucho a mejorar