Introduction to Julia Training Course

Introduction to Julia

• What niche does Julia fill?
• How can Julia support your data analysis work?
• What you can expect to gain from this course
• Getting started with Julia's REPL
• Alternative environments for Julia development: Juno, IJulia, and Sublime-IJulia
• The Julia ecosystem: documentation and package search
• Finding additional help: Julia forums and the broader Julia community

Strings: Hello World

• Introduction to the Julia REPL and batch execution using "Hello World"
• Julia String Types

Scalar Types

• What is a variable? Why do we assign it a name and a type?
• Integers
• Floating-point numbers
• Complex numbers
• Rational numbers

Arrays

• Vectors
• Matrices
• Multi-dimensional arrays
• Heterogeneous arrays (cell arrays)
• Comprehensions

Other Elementary Types

• Tuples
• Ranges
• Dictionaries
• Symbols

Building Your Own Types

• Abstract types
• Composite types
• Parametric composite types

Functions

• How to define a function in Julia
• Julia functions as methods operating on types
• Multiple dispatch
• How multiple dispatch differs from traditional object-oriented programming
• Parametric functions
• Functions that modify their input
• Anonymous functions
• Optional function arguments
• Required function arguments

Constructors

• Inner constructors
• Outer constructors

Control Flow

• Compound expressions and scoping
• Conditional evaluation
• Loops
• Exception handling
• Tasks

Code Organisation

• Modules
• Packages

Metaprogramming

• Symbols
• Expressions
• Quoting
• Internal representation
• Parsing
• Evaluation
• Interpolation

Reading and Writing Data

• Filesystem
• Data I/O
• Lower-level Data I/O
• Dataframes

Distributions and Statistics

• Defining distributions
• Interface for evaluating and sampling from distributions
• Mean, variance, and covariance
• Hypothesis testing
• Generalised linear models: a linear regression example

Plotting

• Plotting packages: Gadfly, Winston, Gaston, PyPlot, Plotly, Vega
• Introduction to Gadfly
• Interact and Gadfly

Parallel Computing

• Introduction to Julia's message-passing implementation
• Remote calling and fetching
• Parallel map (pmap)
• Parallel for
• Scheduling via tasks
• Distributed arrays