Ivo Balbaert - Julia 1.0 Programming Dynamic and High-Performance Programming to Build Fast Scientific Applications

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First published: February 2015
Second edition: September 2018

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Ivo Balbaert has been a lecturer in web programming and databases at CVO Antwerpen (www.cvoantwerpen.be), a community college in Belgium. He received a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20 years in the software industry as a developer and consultant in several companies, and for 10 years as project manager at the University Hospital of Antwerp. From 2000 onwards, he switched to partly teaching and partly developing software (at KHM Mechelen, CVO Antwerpen). He also wrote an introductory book in Dutch about developing in Ruby and Rails, Programmeren met Ruby en Rails, by Van Duuren Media. In 2012, he authored a book on the Go programming language, The Way To Go, by IUniverse. He wrote a number of introductory books for new programming languages, notably Dart, Julia, Rust, and Red, all published by Packt.

Malcolm Sherrington has been working in computing for over 35 years. He holds degrees in mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. He is running his own company, focusing on the aerospace, healthcare, and finance sectors, with specific interests in High-Performance Computing and applications of GPUs and parallelism. Always hands-on, Malcolm started programming scientific problems in Fortran and C, progressing through Ada and Common Lisp, and recently became involved with data processing and analytics in Perl, Python, and R. Malcolm is the organizer of the London Julia User Group

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Julia is a now a well-established programming language. It was developed at MIT in the Applied Computing Group under the supervision of Prof. Alan Edelman. Its development started in 2009, and it was first presented publicly in February 2012. It has now reached its first production version: Julia v1.0 (published Aug 8, 2018), which means that stability is guaranteed for the complete duration of version 1. It is based on clear and solid principles, and its popularity is steadily increasing in the technical, data scientist, and high-performance computing arena.

This book is intended for data scientists and all those who work on technical and scientific computation projects. It will get you up and running quickly with Julia to start simplifying your projects' applications. The book assumes you already have some basic working knowledge of a high-level dynamic language such as MATLAB, R, Python, or Ruby.

, Installing the Julia Platform, explains how to install all the necessary components for a Julia environment. It teaches you how to work with Julia's console (the REPL) and discusses some of the more elaborate development editors you can use.

, Variables, Types, and Operations, discusses the elementary built-in types in Julia and the operations that can be performed on them so that you are prepared to start writing code with them.

, Functions, teaches you why functions are the basic building blocks of Julia, and how to effectively use them.

, Control Flow, shows Julia's elegant control constructs, how to perform error handling, and how to use coroutines (called Tasks in Julia) to structure the execution of your code.

, Collection Types, explores the different types that group individual values, such as arrays and matrices, tuples, dictionaries, and sets.