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)

Basic graphic packages

These packages are, confusingly, supported by two Julia groups, namely JuliaGraphics (https://github.com/JuliaGraphics), and JuliaPlots (https://github.com/JuliaPlots), so these are both great sources of reference.

First, we will shift to more familiar territory by discussing the graphics implemented through Python modules. We will cover ones we have met on various occasions throughout this book already – that is, PyPlot and its cousin, PythonPlot.

PyPlot and PythonPlot

PyPlot is a part of the work of Steven Johnson of MIT, which arose from the previous development of the PyCall module. We have used it extensively in the previous chapters and will take a little time to discuss it further here.

Note that PyPlot is one of the graphics packages that can be used as a backend for the Plots API, with the others being GR and PlotlyJS. We will cover these later in this chapter.

PyPlot provides an interface to the matplotlib plotting library from...