Introducing Julia

Julia is a recent arrival to the world of programming languages and has yet to accumulate a profusion of introductory texts. This will surely change. Soon we might see:

• Julia in 24 hours
• Learn Julia the Hard Way
• Julia for Dummies
• Julia for Fun and Profit

and many others. But until then, here’s a collection of notes and introductory paragraphs that comprise a gentle introduction to the Julia programming language, in the form of a wikibook.

The advantage and disadvantage of Wikibooks, apart from being free and open, is that anyone can edit anything at any time. In theory, a wikibook can only get better as more people add improvements and corrections. In practice, a wikibook may lose focus and consistency as it gains accuracy and coverage. But, because the Julia community has established a good ethos of encouraging participation in the development of the language, it’s right that this wikibook is freely editable by everyone.

The official Julia documentation is excellent, although aimed more at the early adopters, developers, and more experienced programmers. Refer to it as often as possible.

Much of the text in this wikibook should work with the current version of Julia, which is, as of September 2014, version 0.3.