Julia is a now a well-established programming language. It was developed at MIT in the Applied Computing Group under the supervision of Prof. Alan Edelman. Its development started in 2009, and it was first presented publicly in February 2012. It has now reached its first production version: Julia v1.0 (published Aug 8, 2018), which means that stability is guaranteed for the complete duration of version 1. It is based on clear and solid principles, and its popularity is steadily increasing in the technical, data scientist, and high-performance computing arena.
This book is intended for data scientists and all those who work on technical and scientific computation projects. It will get you up and running quickly with Julia to start simplifying your projects' applications. The book assumes you already have some basic working knowledge of a high-level dynamic language such as MATLAB, R, Python, or Ruby.
Chapter 1, Installing the Julia Platform, explains how to install all the necessary components for a Julia environment. It teaches you how to work with Julia's console (the REPL) and discusses some of the more elaborate development editors you can use.
Chapter 2, Variables, Types, and Operations, discusses the elementary built-in types in Julia and the operations that can be performed on them so that you are prepared to start writing code with them.
Chapter 3, Functions, teaches you why functions are the basic building blocks of Julia, and how to effectively use them.
Chapter 4, Control Flow, shows Julia's elegant control constructs, how to perform error handling, and how to use coroutines (called Tasks in Julia) to structure the execution of your code.
Chapter 5, Collection Types, explores the different types that group individual values, such as arrays and matrices, tuples, dictionaries, and sets.
Chapter 6, More on Types, Methods, and Modules, digs deeper into the type concept and how it is used in multiple dispatch to get C-like performance. Modules, a higher code organizing concept, are discussed as well.
Chapter 7, Metaprogramming in Julia, touches on deeper layers of Julia, such as expressions and reflection capabilities, and demonstrates the power of macros.
Chapter 8, I/O, Networking, and Parallel Computing, shows how to work with data in files and databases by using DataFrames. It also looks at networking capabilities, and how to set up a parallel computing environment with Julia.
Chapter 9, Running External Programs, looks at how Julia interacts with the command-line and with other languages, and also discusses performance tips.
Chapter 10, The Standard Library and Packages, digs deeper into the standard library, and demonstrates important packages for the visualization of data.
To run the code examples in the book, you will need the Julia platform for your computer, which can be downloaded from http://julialang.org/downloads/. To work more comfortably with Julia scripts, a development environment such as IJulia, Sublime Text, or Visual Studio Code is advisable. The first chapter contains detailed instructions on how to set up your Julia environment.
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There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
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