Learning Julia

Learn Julia language for data science and data analytics

About This Book

• Set up Julia's environment and start building simple programs
• Explore the technical aspects of Julia and its potential when it comes to speed and data processing
• Write efficient and high-quality code in Julia

Who This Book Is For

This book allows existing programmers, statisticians and data scientists to learn the Julia and take its advantage while building applications with complex numerical and scientific computations. Basic knowledge of mathematics is needed to understand the various methods that will be used or created in the book to exploit the capabilities for which Julia is made.

What You Will Learn

• Understand Julia's ecosystem and create simple programs
• Master the type system and create your own types in Julia
• Understand Julia's type system, annotations, and conversions
• Define functions and understand meta-programming and multiple dispatch
• Create graphics and data visualizations using Julia
• Build programs capable of networking and parallel computation
• Develop real-world applications and use connections for RDBMS and NoSQL
• Learn to interact with other programming languages–C and Python—using Julia

In Detail

Julia is a highly appropriate language for scientific computing, but it comes with all the required capabilities of a general-purpose language. It allows us to achieve C/Fortran-like performance while maintaining the concise syntax of a scripting language such as Python. It is perfect for building high-performance and concurrent applications. From the basics of its syntax to learning built-in object types, this book covers it all.

This book shows you how to write effective functions, reduce code redundancies, and improve code reuse. It will be helpful for new programmers who are starting out with Julia to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers/statisticians/data scientists who want to add Julia to their skill-set.

The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Julia and in-depth informative examples, using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple mathematical operations, creating loops, metaprogramming, functions, collections, multiple dispatch, and so on.

By the end of the book, you will be able to apply your skills in Julia to create and explore applications of any domain.

Style and approach

This book demonstrates the basics of Julia along with some data structures and testing tools that will give you enough material to get started with the language from an application standpoint.