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)

Overview of Julia

Julia was first released to the world in February 2012 after a couple of years of development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was followed by a couple of years of development at MIT. Later, in 2015, a commercial arm called Julia Computing was set up to acquire funding and provide consultancy and (some) enterprise packages; this was later renamed to JuliaHub to reflect the inclusion of a cloud computing platform facility, at present, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The use of the JuliaHub cloud is discussed in the last chapter of this book.

Most of Julia remains freely available and we will be concentrating on that here. As mentioned previously, version 1.0 was released in 2018 and, at present, is approaching v1.9.0, although there seem to be no plans for a main release to mark crossing the v2 barrier.

All the original developers – Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral Shah – still maintain roles in the evolution...