Think Julia: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

Think Julia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

A paper version of this book is published by O’Reilly Media and can be bought on Amazon.

Preface

In January 2018 I started the preparation of a programming course targeting students without programming experience. I wanted to use Julia, but I found that there existed no book with the purpose of learning to program with Julia as the first programming language. There are wonderful tutorials that explain Julia’s key concepts, but none of them pay sufficient attention to learning how to think like a programmer.

I knew the book Think Python by Allen Downey, which contains all the key ingredients to learn to program properly. However, this book was based on the Python programming language. My first draft of the course notes was a melting pot of all kinds of reference works, but the longer I worked on it, the more the content started to resemble the chapters of Think Python. Soon, the idea of developing my course notes as a port of that book to Julia came to fruition.

All the material was available as Jupyter notebooks in a GitHub repository. After I posted a message on the Julia Discourse site about the progress of my course, the feedback was overwhelming. A book about basic programming concepts with Julia as the first programming language was apparently a missing link in the Julia universe. I contacted Allen to ask if I could start an official port of Think Python to Julia, and his answer was immediate: “Go for it!” He put me in touch with his editor at O’Reilly Media, and a year later I was putting the finishing touches on this book.

It was a bumpy ride. In August 2018 Julia v1.0 was released, and like all my fellow Julia programmers I had to do a migration of the code. All the examples in the book were tested during the conversion of the source files to O’Reilly-compatible AsciiDoc files. Both the toolchain and the example code had to be made Julia v1.0–compliant. Luckily, there are no lectures to give in August….

I hope you enjoy working with this book, and that it helps you learn to program and think like a computer scientist, at least a little bit.

Ben Lauwens