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)

The Julia Type System

In this chapter and the next two, we will discuss the features that make Julia appealing to data scientists and scientific programmers.

Julia was conceived to meet the frustrations of the principal developers with existing programming languages. It is well designed and beautifully written. Moreover, much of the code is written in Julia so is available to be inspected and changed. Although we do not advocate modifying much of the base code (also known as the standard library), it is there to look at and learn from.

Much of this book is aimed at the analyst with some programming skills and the jobbing programmer, so we will postpone the guts of the Julia system until the last chapter, when we consider package development and contributing to the Julia community.

We will begin by continuing our discussion on functions, followed by a more in-depth discussion about the Julia type system.

This chapter will cover the following:

  • Using optional parameters...