Chapter 2. Developing in Julia

Julia is a feature-rich language. It was designed to appeal to the novice programmer and purist alike. Indeed for those whose interests lie in data science, statistics and mathematical modeling, Julia is well equipped to meet all their needs.

Our aim is to furnish the reader with the necessary knowledge to begin programming in Julia almost immediately. So rather than begin with an overview of the language's syntax, control structures and the like, we will introduce Julia's facets gradually over the rest of this book. Over the next two chapters we will look at some of the basic and advanced features of the Julia core. Many of the features such as graphics and database access, which are implemented via the package system will be left until later.

If you are familiar with programming in Python, R, MATLAB and so on, you will not find the journey terribly arduous, in fact we believe it will be a particularly pleasant one.

At the present time Julia has not yet reached the version 1.0 status and some of the syntax may be deprecated and later changed. However, we believe that most of the material presented here will stand the test of time.