JuliaForScientists

An interactive, introductory course to the Julia language for scientists. Material for the PhD course at IFIC (CSIC/UV)

Prerequisites

The course is though for students that have some experience in scientific/numerical computing, but no prior experience with the Julia language. Students should have coded previously in other languages (python, C, Fortran, ...).

We expect you to know:

• What a data type is: float, int, strings, bool/logical, etc... The basic concept of custom/derived types
• The basics of programming: iterations (loops), and conditionals (if-then-else).
• The basic concept of function/subroutine. Modularity of a code.

On the other hand we do not expect you to have experience in OO languages, or previous experience in Julia.

Requirements

In short: before the first lecture you should install:

• Julia v1.7
• A text editor (i.e VScode)
• The course repository JuliaForScientists.

Now the longer explanation:

All students should come to the course with a working environment of Julia v1.7. Installing Julia is quite easy, and consists basically of using the correct file for your operating system. Julia can be used with your favorite text editor, although in the course we will try to use VScode. Some basic detailed instructions can be found in many on-line tutorials, for example, this one. To fully profit from the course, the student should make an effort to consult this material before the first class.

We also recommend that you download the course repository from github (https://github.com/andLaing/JuliaForScientists.git) and check that it works properly by activating its environment and running the tests: from the commandline

<your terminal> julia
               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.7.1 (2021-12-22)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |

julia>]
(@v1.7) pkg> activate .
  Activating project at `~/julia_course/test/JuliaForScientists`

(JuliaForScientists) pkg> instantiate
...
(JuliaForScientists) pkg> test

We will use Pluto notebooks in class. This will be covered in the first session, but if you get some experience with it, that would of course be great. This short video is nice, and there are many more on-line tools available.