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)

Binary files

Julia can handle binary files as easily as text files using read() and write().

Earlier, we created a simple grayscale image for a Julia set. Here, we will read the file and invert the image:

julia> cd(ENV["HOME"]*"/MJ2/DataSources/Files");
julia>img = open("juliaset.pgm");
julia>magic = chomp(readline(img))

We can open the file in the normal way. The first value is the “magic” number P5 (for a PGM file), terminated by \n, so we can get that with readline().

We will be creating another PGM file so that can write the magic number.

The next line comprises three integers – that is, the width and height of the image and the maximum pixel value (usually 255).

These are read and copied without change:

julia> if magic == "P5"
  out = open("jsetinvert.pgm", "w");
  println(out, magic);
  params = chomp(readline(img));
# Should be =>...