How to Get Started with Julia?

Question

Context: I'm a bioinformatician working primarily in Python. Most of the work is exploratory, and depends largely on Pandas & small functions for string manipulation. The vast python ecosystem doesn't really benefit me, and I've been curious about Julia for a while. Problem is, the resources I can find for learning Julia aren't really geared towards somebody like me. For all the talk about Julia being a general purpose language, a lot of the teaching material leans heavily towards mathematics. I've done like a course and a half on juliaacademy.com, and still not a word on string handling & manipulation - which makes up a big part of my work. The "Introduction to Computational Thinking" MIT course was quite nice, but was more maths than I could comfortably handle.Is there a resource geared towards people like me, ideally something like https://pythonforbiologists.com (it's how I learnt python in the first place).

eigenspace · Accepted Answer

Hey there! I'd say definitely check out https://github.com/BioJulia for a rich ecosystem of very high performance packages made by some bio-informaticians. This is a niche that has some great julia adoption and packages.
For learning the language, I'd honestly say just check out the manual, it's really nice: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/
I'd also encourage you to check out the Julia Zulip https://julialang.zulipchat.com/# and Discourse as two great places to engage the julia community.
Both of these places have a lot of traffic from some of your fellow bio-informaticians as well as lots of other domain experts and are very welcoming of new language learners.

chrispeel · Answer

Try ThinkJulia: https://benlauwens.github.io/ThinkJulia.jl/latest/book.htmlIt's a bit out-of-date, but still useful.