Today brings us a very welcome guest post by Zacharias Voulgaris, author of Julia for Data Science. This is an excellent new book about the Julia language. By reading it you will learn about:

  • IDEs for using Julia
  • Basics of the Julia language
  • Accessing and exploring data
  • Machine learning
  • Advanced data science techniques with Julia (cross-validation, clustering, PCA, and more)

The book has a nice flow for someone starting out with Julia and the topics are well explained. Enjoy the post, and hopefully you get a chance to check out the book.

Introducing Julia for Data Science (Technics Publications), a Great Resource for Anyone Interested in Data Science.

Over the past couple of years, there have been several books on the Julia language, a relatively new and versatile tool for computationally-heavy applications. Julia has been adopted extensively by the scientific community as it provided a great alternative to MATLAB and R, while its high-level programming style made it easy for people who were not adept programmers. Also, lately it has attracted the attention of computer science professionals (including Python programmers) as well as data scientists. These people who were already very effective coders, decided to learn this language as well, since it provided undeniable benefits in terms of performance and rapid prototype development, esp. when it came to numeric applications. In addition, the fact that Julia was and is still being developed by a few top MIT graduates goes on to show that this is not a novelty doomed to fade away soon, but instead it is a serious effort that’s bound to linger for many years to come.

However, this post is not about Julia per se, since there are many other people who have made its many merits known to the world since the language was first released in 2012. Instead, we aim to talk about the lesser-known aspects of the language, namely its abundant applications in the fascinating field of data science. Although there are already some reliable resources out there pinpointing the fact that Julia is undoubtedly ready for data science, this book is the first and most complete resource on this topic. Without assuming any prior knowledge of the language, it guides you step-by-step to the mastery of the Julia essentials, helping you get comfortable enough to use it for a variety data science applications. It may not make you an expert in the language, but data scientists rarely care about the esoteric aspects of the programming tools they use, since this level of know-how is not required for getting stuff done. However, the reader is given enough information to be able to investigate those aspects on his own.

The Julia for Data Science book has been in development for about a year and is heavily focused on the applications part, with lots of code snippets, examples, and even questions and exercises, in every chapter. Also, it makes use of a couple of datasets that closely resemble the real-world ones that data scientists encounter in their everyday work. On top of that, it provides you with some theory on the data science process (there is a whole chapter of it dedicated to this, although other books usually devote a couple of pages to it). Although the book is not a complete guide to data science, it provides you with enough information to have a sense of perspective and understand how everything fits together. It is by no means a recipe book, though you can use it as reference one, once you have finished reading it.

The Julia for Data Science book is available at the publisher’s website, as well as on Amazon, in both paperback and eBook formats. We encourage you to give it a read and experience first-hand how Julia can enrich your data science toolbox!