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

Julia's type system


Before we go any further and start exploring Julia's types system in detail, we need to know what types are, and why they are even required.

What are types?

To answer this question, consider the following four lines:

1
1.10
'j'
"julia"

What do we see here? For sure, it's very plain and simple for us to understand that all four lines have different kinds of data. Starting from the first line: we have 1, which is an integer; 1.10, which is a float (or decimal); 'j', which represents a single character; and lastly, "Julia", which is a simple string made from a collection of characters used together.

But, even though we have prior knowledge about the data types in use, how do we let the machine know the same? How will the computer know that 1 is an integer, and not a float or a string? Well, the answer to this question is types!

Statically-typed versus dynamically-typed languages

In the modern programming world, we simply have two different ways of telling the compiler or the interpreter...