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

Gadfly


Gadfly is an exhaustive plotting and data visualization package written in Julia by Daniel Jones. It is based on the book, The Grammar of Graphics, by Leland Wilkinson. It is largely inspired by ggplot2 for R, which is another amazing package for plotting and visualizations.

Some of the great features of Gadfly that set it apart from all other libraries are listed here:

  • It renders publication quality graphics to SVG, PNG, PostScript, and PDF
  • It has an intuitive and consistent plotting interface
  • It works with IJulia out of the box
  • It offers tight integration with DataFrames.jl
  • It provides interactivity, like panning, zooming, and toggling, powered by snap.svg
  • It supports a large number of common plot types

Installing Gadfly is pretty easy and similar to Vega. The entry for this package can be found in METADATA.jl. There are, however, some dependencies, which will also be automatically installed by the package itself:

julia> Pkg.add("Gadfly")
julia> using Gadly

Interacting with Gadfly using...