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)

Summary

This chapter introduced you to Julia, and how to download it, install it, and build it from the source. We saw that the language is elegant, concise, and powerful, and introduced some simple Julia coding examples.

The next four chapters will discuss the features of Julia in more depth.

We looked at interacting with Julia via the command line (REPL) in order to use a random walk method to evaluate the price of an Asian option. Also, we discussed the use of the VS Code editor and two IDEs, IJulia and Pluto, as an alternative to the REPL.

Additionally, we reviewed the built-in package manager, how to add, update and remove modules, and then demonstrated the use of two graphics packages to display typical trajectories of the Asian option calculation. In later chapters, we will look at various other approaches in order to create display graphics and quality visualizations.

In the next chapter, we will begin our detailed look at coding in Julia by discussing its primitive...