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)

Development tools

In this section, I want to introduce some factors that should be considered when creating code for others to use and possibly contribute to, which will not necessarily be as strictly adhered to here as we are doing so for our own usage.

These cover topics such as documentation, debugging, revision, and profiling, together with some degree of standardization, which I will tackle here, but not necessarily in that order. For an actual example of creating a package, that will be deferred until the following section.

Document strings

It is pantomime season in the UK at present, and I with my family go every year to the current offering in Wimbledon. All children over the age of 2 love it, although hopefully they don’t get all the jokes, and it gives the adults (who mostly do) a chance to go as well.

So, for some of the rest of this chapter, I am using a file introduced in the preceding getopt.jl example, panto.jl, with three pantomime characters: Aladdin...