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

In this chapter, we looked at how Julia handles data input and output. We discussed how to perform simple I/O via the console and extended that to operating on text-based files on disk, extending this to structured data in the form of CSV and other DLM files. After, we looked at performing I/O operations on binary files and files formatted via the HDF5 and JLD file schemas.

Then, we considered interacting with datasets from Julia modules such as those contained in the RDatasets package and we saw how handling these leads naturally to Julia’s implementation of “R” style DataFrames, such as pandas in Python, and also of its sibling the time array.

Finally, we looked at how to visualize the datasets and further analyze the values by applying some simple statistical routines by computing descriptive metrics, kernel densities, and hypothesis testing.

Later in this book, we will introduce methods for dealing with data contained within databases and other...