How I went from zero-to-hero with julia. My story

Offtopic
1

Hi everyone,

I need to write something on discourse. Otherwise, I am done with my project without even one question or post.

Therefore I share how I went from zero-to-hero with Julia.

First I picked Julia because of the SCIML packages. The core of my project was differential equations with delay and stochastics.
My project is a hobby, that limited the choice to FOSS software only.

Internet was pointing quite clearly to Julia for differential equations.
In the meantime, I have benchmarked Maxima, Scilab and R.

In my case the Julia learning curve worked like this:

I got started 100% on :

Then I equally used :
25% Official docs
30% Sciml docs
30% Discourse

A little bit of
5% Stackflow
5% Reddit

5% Youtube , especially the SCIML videos. Not much of a use, but I have noticed that the videos can be quite useful.

Practically zero on Facebook

Since I found all that I needed above I have not used slack and gitter?

All in all, Discourse has been crucial because it had all those serious blocking issues answered with examples, and that is the reason why I have finished to project without questions.

Actually, most of the problems have been about managing the output and especially producing images.

Facebook is probably good only for announcements.
This is mine:

I am currently finishing some sort of 450 pages readme.md file of this project that I have decided to publish as a kindle book.
I am doing the cover today.

19 Likes
2

For those who prefer to stay away from Facebook, any other options?

1 Like
3

I have been finding the videos super useful when I thought about writing the book with https://jupyterbook.org/
Jupyter in general was easier to learn with videos.

But then I did a 180 degrees turn. I decided to publish it as a re-flowable e-book on kdp. KDP (but EPUB in general ?) doesn’t accept any formula. I had to transform all the formulas into images.

For a book describing code listing Jupyterbook would have been really cool! But kind of difficult.

1 Like
4

Thanks @joeganiomego for the JuliaByExample link.

5

Thanks to you. https://juliabyexample.helpmanual.io/ got me started with Julia so easy that a few hours later I was already putting down the skeleton of my model. :julia: :juliabouncer: :juliabouncing: :juliaclockwork: :juliacomputing: :juliacn: :juliadocs: :juliaeclipse: :juliagraphs: :juliagrower: :juliaheartpulse: :juliaheartpulse_dark: :juliaheartpulsing: :juliaislinux: :juliaislisp: :juliamath: :juliaml: :juliapool: :juliapulsing: :juliaspinner: :juliatan: :juliatext: :julia_troll: :jump:

1 Like
6

No problem :slightly_smiling_face:, Joe.
At the moment Julia is pretty new to me, but as I see it it’s a fine and powerful language.