Learn Julia the Hard Way

The Julia base package is pretty big, although at the same time, there are lots of other packages around to expand it with. The result is that on the whole, it is impossible to give a thorough overview of all that Julia can do in just a few brief exercises. Therefore, I had to adopt a little 'bias', or 'slant' if you please, in deciding what to focus on and what to ignore. Julia is a technical computing language, although it does have the capabilities of any general-purpose language and you'd be hard-pressed to find tasks it's completely unsuitable for (although that does not mean it's the best or easiest choice for any of them). Julia was developed with the occasional reference to R, and with an avowed intent to improve upon R's clunkiness. R is a great language, but relatively slow, to the point that most people use it to rapidly prototype, and then implement the algorithm for production in Python or Java. Julia seeks to be as approachable as R but without the speed penalty.