If you’re just learning how to program, Julia is an excellent JIT-compiled, dynamically typed language with a clean syntax. This hands-on guide uses Julia 1.0 to walk you through programming one step at a time, beginning with basic programming concepts before moving on to more advanced capabilities, such as creating new types and multiple dispatch.

Designed from the beginning for high performance, Julia is a general-purpose language ideal for not only numerical analysis and computational science but also web programming and scripting. Through exercises in each chapter, you’ll try out programming concepts as you learn them. Think Julia is perfect for students at the high school or college level as well as self-learners and professionals who need to learn programming basics.

•  Start with the basics, including language syntax and semantics

•  Get a clear definition of each programming concept

•  Learn about values, variables, statements, functions, and data structures in a logical progression

•  Discover how to work with files and databases

•  Understand types, methods, and multiple dispatch

•  Use debugging techniques to fix syntax, runtime, and semantic errors

•  Explore interface design and data structures through case studies

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Way of the Program

Chapter 2. Variables, Expressions, and Statements

Chapter 3. Functions

Chapter 4. Case Study: Interface Design

Chapter 5. Conditionals and Recursion

Chapter 6. Fruitful Functions

Chapter 7. Iteration

Chapter 8. Strings

Chapter 9. Case Study: Word Play

Chapter 10. Arrays

Chapter 11 . Dict ionaries

Chapter 12. Tuples

Chapter 13. Case Study: Data Structure Selection

Chapter 14. Files

Chapter 15. Structs and Objects

Chapter 16. Structs and Functions

Chapter 17. Multiple Dispatch

Chapter 18. Subtyping

Chapter 19. The Goodies: Syntax

Chapter 20. The Goodies: Base and Standard library

Chapter 21. Debugging

Why Julia?

Julia was originally released in 2012 by Alan Edelman, Stefan Karpinski, Jeff Bezanson, and Viral Shah. It is a free and open source programming language. Choosing a programming language is always subjective. For me, the following characteristics of Julia are decisive:

•  Julia is developed as a high-performance programming language.

•  Julia uses multiple dispatch, which allows the programmer to choose from different programming patterns adapted to the application.

•  Julia is a dynamically typed language that can easily be used interactively.

•  Julia has a nice high-level syntax that is easy to learn.

•  Julia is an optionally typed programming language whose (user-defined) data types make the code clearer and more robust.

•  Julia has an extended standard library and numerous third-party packages are available.

Julia is a unique programming language because it solves the so-called “two languages problem.” No other programming language is needed to write high-performance code. This does not mean it happens automatically. It is the responsibility of the programmer to optimize the code that forms a bottleneck, but this can done in Julia itself. 

Who Is This Book For?

This book is for anyone who wants to learn to program. No formal prior knowledge is required. New concepts are introduced gradually and more advanced topics are described in later chapters. 

Think Julia can be used for a one-semester course at the high school, or college level.

About the Author

Ben Lauwens is a professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy (RMA Belgium). He has a PhD in engineering and master’s degrees from KU Leuven and RMA and a bachelor’s degree from RMA. 

Allen Downey is a Professor of Computer Science at Olin College of Engineering. He has taught at Wellesley College, Colby College and U.C. Berkeley. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and Master's and Bachelor's degrees from MIT.