This is the Docker configuration which allows you to run and tweak the book's notebooks without installing any dependencies on your machine!
OK, any except docker. With docker-compose. Well, you may also want make (but it is only used as thin layer to call a few simple docker-compose commands).
As stated, the two things you need is docker and docker-compose.
Follow the instructions on Install Docker and Install Docker Compose for your environment if you haven't got docker already.
Some general knowledge about docker infrastructure might be useful (that's an interesting topic on its own) but is not strictly required to just run the notebooks.
Switch to docker directory here and run make build (or docker-compose build) to build your docker image. That may take some time but is only required once. Or perhaps a few times after you tweak something in a Dockerfile.
After the process is finished you have a handson-ml image, that will be the base for your experiments. You can confirm that looking on results of docker images command.
Run make run (or just docker-compose up) to start the jupyter server inside the container (also named handson-ml, same as image). Just point your browser to the URL printed on the screen (or just http://localhost:8888 if you enabled password authentication) and you're ready to play with the book's code!
The server runs in the directory containing the notebooks, and the changes you make from the browser will be persisted there.
You can close the server just by pressing Ctrl-C in terminal window.
Run make exec (or docker-compose exec handson-ml bash) while the server is running to run an additional bash shell inside the handson-ml container. Now you're inside the environment prepared within the image.
One of the usefull things that can be done there would be starting TensorBoard (for example with simple tb command, see bashrc file).
Another one may be comparing versions of the notebooks using the nbdiff command if you haven't got nbdime installed locally (it is way better than plain diff for notebooks). See Tools for diffing and merging of Jupyter notebooks for more details.
You can see changes you made relative to the version in git using git diff which is integrated with nbdiff.
You may also try nbd NOTEBOOK_NAME.ipynb command (custom, see bashrc file) to compare one of your notebooks with its checkpointed version.
To be precise, the output will tell you what modifications should be re-played on the manually saved version of the notebook (located in .ipynb_checkpoints subdirectory) to update it to the current i.e. auto-saved version (given as command's argument - located in working directory).