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)

Why use Julia?

Programming in Julia sometimes seems too good to be true. As it has been implemented in the last few years, many of the recent ideas in computer science design have been incorporated into the language and the developers have not been afraid to modify Julia’s structure and syntax on the run-up to version 1.0, even though this has led to deprecations and breaking changes.

We have pointed out previously that Julia creates executable code from scripts without a separate compilation step and this results in runtimes in the same order as those of C, Fortran, Java, and so on; however, in my opinion, that is not the main reason to use Julia. In this section, we will look at the other factors that make it a must-see for any programmer, analyst, and data scientist.

Julia is easy to learn

Writing simple code in Julia will be almost immediate for anyone with a grounding in Python, R, C, and so on, as this book will show.

As mentioned previously, the syntax is...