1 About

Hi, I’m Bart and this is my second open access book entitled:

“Build SH*T with Julia”.

The book contains a set of challenges of varying level of complexity (most likely in the range of easy to moderate). The exercises are for the problems that, for whatever reason, I found interesting. The tasks are accompanied by exemplary solutions in Julia (with explanations). Still, I recommend you try to solve the tasks on your own.

For practical reasons, I will assume this book to be read by curious readers of non-mathematical (i.e. resembling mine) background. Moreover, I expect that the readers have already mastered the language basics and now are on a lookout for a way to hone their newly acquired skills. To that end, I’ll imagine you have read my previous open access book. I’ll do this not not because it is the best book in the world (which it is), but because of the DRY principle (I’m going to apply similar conventions without delving too much into the previously mentioned topics).

For instance, just like in the previous book, here I will use the assert macro to test a function’s assumptions and print error messages. The construct is not recommended in a serious program (see the warning in the docs), but for the purpose of this book should do the trick.

Additionally, henceforth I will define a few type aliases, like:

const Flt = Float64
const Str = String
const Vec = Vector

This will allow for a shorter code when type declarations are used, e.g. Vec{Int} instead Vector{Int}. Notice, that the type synonyms are declared with const keyword, since they will not change for as long as a program runs.

If, for any reason, this book is not to your taste then feel free to visit, e.g. Adam Wysokinski’s the Big Book of Julia and choose a learning resource of your liking. Alternatively you may visit Rosetta Code web-page that contains over 1’000 programming exercises with solutions in different programming languages. Chances are many that of the exercises presented here are to be found there (not that I copied them, it’s just that they’ve been around for quite some time).

Finally, just like in the previous book, I’ll try to write in a possibly simple (clarity over cleverness and performance) and correct manner. Still, I’m only human, so watch out for possible errors and bugs. Anyway, I hope the book will satisfy your appetite, it is available freely under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.