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

Built-in functions


Julia provides a number of built-in functions, which are very helpful once you fully understand the richness of the Julia base library. Like every other language, Julia has functions for most common tasks performed by users, as well as some surprises as we go through this topic.

We will now walk through some of the most common built-in functions one by one, along with detailed examples:

  • workspace(): This is a function specifically for Julia REPL and isn't available outside of it. The work of this function is actually to clear out the current workspace in the Julia REPL, deleting all the functions, variables, constants, or types defined by the user without needing to exit the REPL and restart it once again.
  • typeof(): This function is used mainly to know the data type of an argument passed to it. This is similar to the type() function for those familiar with Python:
julia> typeof("Julia")
String

julia> typeof(1.0)
Float64

julia> typeof(1)
Int64

julia> typeof(0x23...