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)

Textual visualization

Displays that use text refer to packages that do not need a graphics engine (such as QT). The graphics are generated in one of two ways:

  • Using normal printable characters, either ASCII and/or Unicode
  • By writing textual markup, normally based on LaTeX, though via Postscript or even directly to a PDF is possible

We learned how to implement the first of these methods previously, but it will be useful to briefly mention it again here.

Simple inline displays

When we provided an overview of Julia in Chapter 1, we briefly saw that it is possible to create some quite sophisticated text graphics (that is, using printable characters) using the UnicodePlots package. It is the successor of early packages such as ASCIIPlots and TextPlots and provides a wider variety of available graphic types to display.

We saw examples of a line plot and a histogram in Chapter 1. As a quick refresher, I’ll create a horizontal bar plot of the populations...