Developing in Julia

Julia is a feature-rich language. It was designed to appeal to novice programmers and purists alike. For those whose interests lie in data science, statistics, and mathematical modeling, Julia is well-equipped to meet all their needs.

Our aim is to furnish you with the necessary knowledge to begin programming in Julia almost immediately. So, rather than begin with an overview of the language’s syntax, control structures, and the like, we will introduce Julia’s facets gradually over the rest of this book. Over the next four chapters, we will look at some of the basic and advanced features of the Julia core. Many of the features—such as graphics and database access, which are implemented via the package system—will be left until later when discussing more specific aspects of programming Julia.

In this chapter, we will be discussing manipulating Julia’s data structures and will cover the following topics:

• Data types such as integers and floating-point and complex numbers
• Vectors, matrices, and multi-dimensional arrays
• List comprehensions and broadcasting
• Recursive functions
• Characters and strings
• Complex and rational numbers
• Data arrays and data frames
• Dictionaries, sets, stacks, and queues

If you are familiar with programming in Python, R, MATLAB, and so on, you will not find the journey terribly arduous; in fact, we believe it will be a particularly pleasant one.