3 Julia Basics

NOTE: In this chapter we cover the basics of Julia as a programming language. Please note that this is not strictly necessary for you to use Julia as a tool for data manipulation and data visualization. Having a basic understanding of Julia will definitely make you more effective and efficient in using Julia. However, if you prefer to get started straight away, you can jump to Section 4 to learn about tabular data with DataFrames.jl.

This is going to be a very brief and not an in-depth overview of the Julia language. If you are already familiar and comfortable with other programming languages, we highly encourage you to read Julia’s documentation (https://docs.julialang.org/). The docs are an excellent resource for taking a deep dive into Julia. It covers all the basics and corner cases, but it can be cumbersome, especially if you aren’t familiar with software documentation.

We’ll cover the basics of Julia. Imagine that Julia is a fancy feature-loaded car, such as a brand-new Tesla. We’ll just explain to you how to “drive the car, park it, and how to navigate in traffic.” If you want to know what “all the buttons in the steering wheel and dashboard do,” this is not the resource you are looking for.

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Jose Storopoli, Rik Huijzer, Lazaro Alonso