Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By : Malcolm Sherrington
Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By: Malcolm Sherrington

Overview of this book

Julia is a well-constructed programming language which was designed for fast execution speed by using just-in-time LLVM compilation techniques, thus eliminating the classic problem of performing analysis in one language and translating it for performance in a second. This book is a primer on Julia’s approach to a wide variety of topics such as scientific computing, statistics, machine learning, simulation, graphics, and distributed computing. Starting off with a refresher on installing and running Julia on different platforms, you’ll quickly get to grips with the core concepts and delve into a discussion on how to use Julia with various code editors and interactive development environments (IDEs). As you progress, you’ll see how data works through simple statistics and analytics and discover Julia's speed, its real strength, which makes it particularly useful in highly intensive computing tasks. You’ll also and observe how Julia can cooperate with external processes to enhance graphics and data visualization. Finally, you will explore metaprogramming and learn how it adds great power to the language and establish networking and distributed computing with Julia. By the end of this book, you’ll be confident in using Julia as part of your existing skill set.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

The Julia Environment

In this chapter, we will explore all you need to get started on Julia. Julia is a high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language that focuses mainly on technical computing. Its primary feature is that, although it’s a scripting language, the code is compiled using low-level virtual machine (LLVM). This compilation creates code that corresponds to the underlying hardware/operating system and runs at similar speeds to other compiled languages, such as C/C++ and Fortran.

The chapter will cover the following main topics:

  • Acquiring and installing Julia
  • The philosophy behind Julia and comparison with other programming languages
  • Developing code using the REPL, code editors, and IDEs
  • Use of the package management system
  • Some simple coding in Julia
  • A quick look at some graphics

By the end of this chapter, you should have a grasp of the basics of Julia. All the topics introduced are covered in more detail in the later...