Tanmay Teaches Julia for Beginners: A Springboard to Machine Learning for All Ages

by Tanmay Bakshi

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A quick guide to start writing your own fun and useful Julia apps--no prior experience required!

This engaging guide shows, step by step, how to build custom programs using Julia, the open-source, intuitive scripting language. Written by 15-year-old technology phenom Tanmay Bakshi, the book is presented in an accessible style that makes learning easy and enjoyable. Tanmay Teaches Julia for A Springboard to Machine Learning for All Ages clearly explains the basics of Julia programming and takes a look at cutting-edge machine learning applications. You will also discover how to interface your Julia apps with code written in Python.

Inside, you'll learn

- Set up and configure your Julia environment
- Get up and running writing your own Julia apps
- Define variables and use them in your programs
- Use conditions, iterations, for-loops, and while-loops
- Create, go through, and modify arrays
- Build an app to manage things you lend and get back from your friends
- Create and utilize dictionaries
- Simplify maintenance of your code using functions
- Apply functions on arrays and use functions recursively and generically
- Understand and program basic machine learning apps

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computers

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 6, 2019

Reviews

[Rama Rao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Machine Learning

This book introduces the basics of Julia programming. It is essential for beginners but written to be concise and straightforward. The text is very well described with easy to follow step-by-step instructions by a 15-year-old whiz kid. His writing style is amazing, and book-reading is flawless!

For example, we can recognize objects, perceive depth, communicate and understand perspectives and measure outcome of our actions. These are skills that evolved over billions of years. But computers can't understand the contents of images or skills of animal communication, but with machine learning (ML), this challenge is accomplished. Animals learn from experience and so do machine learning algorithms. We can "train" a ML algorithm on a data set, and it'll try to "model" that data set, understand the intricacies and patterns, then define the mapping from input to output. But there's one key difference between training a human and training a machine: a human can learn from very few examples, but a machine requires thousands or even millions of examples to be trained. Training these algorithms requires lot of compute power or parallel computing. In this regard Julia is extremely helpful. It provides a package called Flux that helps you with all your ML needs! A part of the Flux project is called the Metalhead project, which enables us to use pretrained ML algorithms on a computer without having to train them by users of the program.

How does ML works? In machine learning, backpropagation (backprop,[1] BP) is a widely used algorithm in training feedforward neural networks for supervised learning. The algorithms enable computers to find mathematical patterns in vast amounts of data. There are many programming languages like C++, Python and R available for Julia. This enables Julia to combine the simplicity of Python with the speed of C++. One of the prominent features of Julia is its ability to handle mathematical expressions with elegance. Julia is faster than Python because it is designed to quickly implement the math concepts like linear algebra and matrix representations. It is excellent for numerical computing.

Prediction of a physical event does not produce additional energy or matter, but it puts some information from which we can put that in perspective. Information itself is not physical but physical reality may be understood by processing information. My main interest in computing is to simulate the evolution of simple living systems from primordial organic soup. I am very hopeful that ML and programming languages like Julia will enable us in this journey!

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book.

Tanmay is an outstanding teacher.

That being said, the content of this book was amazing. The programming language itself, was not too amazing.

Yes, I do appreciate a pre processed language, but I just find Python so much more fun to code in than Julia.

I am also not a huge fan of ending loops and if statements, and this language has some syntax intricacies that I just didn't like at all.

I do, however, look forward to reading Tanmay Teaches Go: The Ideal Language for Backend Developers soon, and have it on hold at my library!

This was a splendid book to learn a new language. I am just not too sure I will code Julia much in my career.

4.8/5

[Chandra Shekar Andhe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for getting started into the world of AI and ML.

[John Pyrce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm an experienced programmer interested in learning about the Julia programming language, and this was the only book my local library had. Its aimed at beginners (its in the title!) but still gives a flavor. The hook for this book is that the author, Bakshi, is a teenager. I'm impressed by his writing: he uses reasonable examples and provides detailed explanations.

But I'm not his target audience, so this isn't quite what I was looking for.

As to his target audience: this is a good introduction. It is just an introduction, given its short length, and I wonder if the machine learning example he ends with is the best for a true beginner. Its also a legitimate question as to whether Julia is the best vehicle for a beginner. Julia is a new programming language without the depth of resources available for other languages. Maybe Julia will become a dominant language and this will be proved prescient, but I probably wouldn't personally recommend this to a beginner right now.

[D David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A relatively good book. I though recommend using VS Code for writing code instead of Atom which can also compile and features many benefits.
The book is very exciting and I find Julia programming the most compelling and as the best language I have programmed in. However more specifically the physical quality of the book is low. I bought two copies for me and my son to read and study simutaniously, and both the book copies cracked and the pages started falling out when having read about half of the book, which was a drag. The book contains what you can expect of a beginner programming book, and perhaps a bit unpedagogical, but the ease and compelling syntax of Julia programming does very well make up for it.
All in all a super book, but do hope that the second publishing was of a better physical quality.

[Gil Alowaifi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book that helps you to lean the programing language, the programs however have a few mistakes, you will need to trouble shoot the coding errors your self to get them working...