What is the purpose/role of installing fastbook

Part 1 (2019)
1

Hello,
I tried searching but couldn’t find a relevant thread that explains “why we need to install fastbook” Can someone explain its (fastbook’s) role/purpose?

If installing fastbook will enable us to access the fastai github/notebooks in google colab then we can access fastai github notebooks from the following page directly in google colab
Using Colab | Practical Deep Learning for Coders under the section “Opening a chapter of the book”.

My understanding could be way off. Apologize for that.

Thanks & Regards,

Mohit

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The book (and course) uses specific helper functions which are included in the fastbook library.

fastai itself can be installed normally if you are not following the book or the course

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I am following the course, hence, I will have to install the fastbook library. Thank you for helping me.

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Thank you for your answer. I had the same understanding, now confirmed. However, the problem I have with from fastbook import * is that it is hard to trace back which objects are initialized by the fastai library and which are initialized by fastbook. For example, in the 04 MNIST basics notebook, wildcard imports are used for fastai and fastbook, as pictured below:
image

Later, there is a call to untar_data and URLs. If I do not inspect these objects explicitly, I am not sure where they are called from. In another step, I see pathlib.Path being initialized. It looks like it was imported implicitly, but I’m not sure if it was fastai or fastbook that imported it.

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What I mean is that it is harder for me to generalize the fastai interface on projects outside of the course because of this convoluted module import interface. When I look at the dir() output after from fastbook import *, I see that there is a lot going on. I have np and pd imported alongside objects from fastai, the standard Python library, and many more. Some documentation on the objects called by fastbook and how the module relates to fastai and fastcore would be beneficial for those who are trying to understand this ecosystem. There are amazing docs for ‘fastai’ and fastcore' but found none for fastbook`.

I apologize if I sound like I am complaining. The fastai environment is amazing in general. I just found this one inconvenience so far and thought that maybe there are materials out there that could help people like me. If not, then maybe this forum thread can become a resource for others.