Book Image

Julia Programming Projects

By : Adrian Salceanu
Book Image

Julia Programming Projects

By: Adrian Salceanu

Overview of this book

Julia is a new programming language that offers a unique combination of performance and productivity. Its powerful features, friendly syntax, and speed are attracting a growing number of adopters from Python, R, and Matlab, effectively raising the bar for modern general and scientific computing. After six years in the making, Julia has reached version 1.0. Now is the perfect time to learn it, due to its large-scale adoption across a wide range of domains, including fintech, biotech, education, and AI. Beginning with an introduction to the language, Julia Programming Projects goes on to illustrate how to analyze the Iris dataset using DataFrames. You will explore functions and the type system, methods, and multiple dispatch while building a web scraper and a web app. Next, you'll delve into machine learning, where you'll build a books recommender system. You will also see how to apply unsupervised machine learning to perform clustering on the San Francisco business database. After metaprogramming, the final chapters will discuss dates and time, time series analysis, visualization, and forecasting. We'll close with package development, documenting, testing and benchmarking. By the end of the book, you will have gained the practical knowledge to build real-world applications in Julia.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Advanced documentation tips


You may have noticed in the previous snippet that we have to repeat the signature of the packageuri function in the DocString. The problem here is that the documentation can get out of sync if we change the function declaration, but omit to update the documentation. Julia's package ecosystem provides a library that extends the default documentation functionality, named DocStringExtensions. It's a registered package, so it can be added with (IssueReporter) pkg> add DocStringExtensions. It provides a series of methods that can be used to automatically generate some of the repetitive parts of the documentation process. For example, once we add using DocStringExtensions to the IssueReporter module, we can replace the function declaration from the docstring with the $(SIGNATURES) abbreviation. We'll see how to do that right away.

Another valuable feature of DocStrings is that the examples can also serve as tests. This kind of testing is called a doctest. Basically...