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

Creating packages


Every language in the current programming ecosystem comes with a set of built-in packages. Some languages have an extensive list of built-in packages for performing most common operations such as basic IO and HTTP servers, while some prefer to have a bare minimum of built-ins which can be extended later as per their usage.

But, what exactly is a package? In the easiest terms, its a self-contained collection of well-tested code that can be used by other parts of the program or the application. The purpose might be to enhance the already existing functionality, or to create the base for an upcoming new feature, or simply might be a set of utilities, which can be used across the program.

Julia provides an easy way to create a package. But, how should you start creating one from scratch? The first step will obviously be to name the package you want to create. That may sound simple, but the Julia community is very particular about its naming conventions, and hence, following are...