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)

Not only, but also…

Julia was initially designed with scientific computing in mind and has made considerable strides in recent years in the fields of machine learning, optimization, solution of differential systems, and so on, all of which will be dealt with topics in the latter portion of this book.

However, Julia was originally seen as a vehicle for the emerging discipline of data science, possibly as an alternative or adjunct to more popular approaches, and it is worth remarking that practitioners in data science would be advised to see what Julia has to offer here as well.

Although the term data science was coined as early as the 1970s, it was only given prominence in 2001 by William S. Cleveland in his article, Data Science: An Action Plan for Expanding the Technical Areas of the Field of Statistics.

Almost in parallel with the development of Julia has been the growth in data science and the demand for data science practitioners.

What is data science?

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