Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming Complete Reference Guide

By : Ivo Balbaert, Adrian Salceanu
Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming Complete Reference Guide

By: Ivo Balbaert, Adrian Salceanu

Overview of this book

Julia offers the high productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++. There’s never been a better time to learn this language, thanks to its large-scale adoption across a wide range of domains, including fintech, biotech and artificial intelligence (AI). You will begin by learning how to set up a running Julia platform, before exploring its various built-in types. This Learning Path walks you through two important collection types: arrays and matrices. You’ll be taken through how type conversions and promotions work, and in further chapters you'll study how Julia interacts with operating systems and other languages. You’ll also learn about the use of macros, what makes Julia suitable for numerical and scientific computing, and how to run external programs. Once you have grasped the basics, this Learning Path goes on to how to analyze the Iris dataset using DataFrames. While building a web scraper and a web app, you’ll explore the use of functions, methods, and multiple dispatches. In the final chapters, you'll delve into machine learning, where you'll build a book recommender system. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be well versed with Julia and have the skills you need to leverage its high speed and efficiency for your applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Julia 1.0 Programming - Second Edition by Ivo Balbaert • Julia Programming Projects by Adrian Salceanu
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Methods

If you come from an OOP background, you may have noticed a very interesting aspect throughout our discussion of types. Unlike other languages, objects in Julia do not define behavior. That is, Julia's types only define fields (properties) but do not encapsulate functions.

The reason is Julia's implementation of multiple dispatcha distinctive feature of the language.

Multiple dispatch is explained in the official documentation as follows:

"The choice of which method to execute when a function is applied is called dispatch. Julia allows the dispatch process to choose which of a function's methods to call based on the number of arguments given, and on the types of all of the function's arguments. This is different than traditional object-oriented languages, where dispatch occurs based only on the first argument [...]. Using all of a function...