Engheim E. Julia for Beginners: From Romans to Rockets

Leanpub/Sixty North AS, 2020. — 474 p.Learn the hot new programming language for Data Science and Machine Learning. Julia is an easy-to-use, high-performance, general programming language. You can use Julia for anything from simple scripting to writing a climate model running on a supercomputer.A beginner-friendly guide to the Julia programming language. Julia is an exciting, young programming language rapidly gaining popularity in the areas of Data Science, Machine Learning, and High-Performance Computing.While Julia is exceptionally good in these areas, we believe Julia is also an exceptionally powerful general-purpose programming language and believe there should be a book teaching Julia to beginners and experienced developers alike.This book engages the reader with fun programming examples involving building and launching a rocket, implementing simple encryption algorithms used by Roman armies, and simulating a mechanical calculator. While the book aims to be beginner friendly, we don’t shy away from the important detail of how multiple dispatches work, or how to think about functional and object-oriented programming in Julia.The important reason I wanted to write this book is that people keep telling me: “Julia? Isn’t that a language only for science and scientists?” Julia has had major success in this area, which is why the Julia community today is full of brainy people working on hard problems such as developing new drugs, modeling the spread of infectious diseases, climate change, or the economy. But no, you don’t need to be a genius or scientist to use Julia. Julia is a wonderful general-purpose programming language for everyone! I am not a scientist and I have enjoyed using it for over 7 years now. With Julia, you will find that you can solve problems more quickly and elegantly than you have done in the past. And as a cherry on top, computationally intensive code will run blisteringly fast.I have chosen to teach you to the Julia programming language. Why did I pick this language, when there are hundreds of others to choose from, some of which are much better known?
It is a fun language! The language plays on your team instead of against you.
Easy-to-learn. Some languages require you to learn a myriad of details before you get to do anything at all. Julia lets you learn one small thing at a time.
Powerful. You can get a lot done with very small amounts of code.
Batteries included. Don’t you hate it when you unpack a cool new thing and it doesn’t work, because batteries are sold separately? A lot of programming languages are like that, but not Julia.
Fast. You can write code that runs slow in any language, but Julia gives you the ability to write very high-performance code.