Book Image

Learning Julia

By : Anshul Joshi, Rahul Lakhanpal
Book Image

Learning Julia

By: Anshul Joshi, Rahul Lakhanpal

Overview of this book

Julia is a highly appropriate language for scientific computing, but it comes with all the required capabilities of a general-purpose language. It allows us to achieve C/Fortran-like performance while maintaining the concise syntax of a scripting language such as Python. It is perfect for building high-performance and concurrent applications. From the basics of its syntax to learning built-in object types, this book covers it all. This book shows you how to write effective functions, reduce code redundancies, and improve code reuse. It will be helpful for new programmers who are starting out with Julia to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers/statisticians/data scientists who want to add Julia to their skill-set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Julia and in-depth informative examples, using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple mathematical operations, creating loops, metaprogramming, functions, collections, multiple dispatch, and so on. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply your skills in Julia to create and explore applications of any domain.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Data Visualization and Graphics

Starting with Julia REPL


We have already learned how to start the Julia REPL and evaluate basic statements in it.

There are various options provided by Julia for running the program. We can directly run statements without even opening the REPL:

$ julia -e 'println("Hello World")'
Hello World

We can even run a loop without starting the REPL:

$ julia -e 'for i=1:5; println("Hello World"); end'
Hello World
Hello World

It is also possible to pass arguments:

$ julia -e 'for i in ARGS; println(i); end' k2so r2d2 c3po r4 bb8
k2so
r2d2
c3po
r4
bb8

ARGS is used to take command-line arguments to the script.

We can find the different options that Julia supports using the --help option:

$ julia --help

julia [switches] -- [programfile] [args...]
-v, --version             Display version information
-h, --help                Print this message
-H, --home <dir>          Set location of `julia` executable
-e, --eval <expr>         Evaluate <expr>
-E, --print <expr>        Evaluate and...