This four-module course introduces users to Julia as a first language. Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language developed specifically for scientific computing. This language will be particularly useful for applications in physics, chemistry, astronomy, engineering, data science, bioinformatics and many more. As open source software, you will always have it available throughout your working life. It can also be used from the command line, program files or a new type of interface known as a Jupyter notebook (which is freely available as a service from JuliaBox.com).
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Julia Scientific Programming
University of Cape TownAbout this Course
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Beginner Level
Approx. 18 hours to complete
English
Subtitles: Arabic, French, Portuguese (European), Italian, Vietnamese, German, Russian, English, Spanish
Skills you will gain
- Julia (Programming Language)
- Computer Programming
- Ipython
- Data Visualization (DataViz)
Flexible deadlines
Reset deadlines in accordance to your schedule.
Shareable Certificate
Earn a Certificate upon completion
100% online
Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.
Beginner Level
Approx. 18 hours to complete
English
Subtitles: Arabic, French, Portuguese (European), Italian, Vietnamese, German, Russian, English, Spanish
Offered by
University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town is the oldest university in South Africa and is one of the leading research universities on the African continent. UCT has over 25 000 students, of whom 30% are postgraduate students. We offer degrees in six faculties: Commerce, Engineering & the Built Environment, Health Sciences, Humanities, Law, and Science. We pride ourself on our diverse student body, which reflects the many cultures and backgrounds of the region. We welcome international students and are currently home to thousands of international students from over 100 countries. UCT has a tradition of academic excellence that is respected world-wide and is privileged to have more than 30 A-rated researchers on our staff, all of whom are recognised as world leaders in their field. Our aim is to ensure that our research contributes to the public good through sharing knowledge for the benefit of society. Past students include five Nobel Laureates – Max Theiler, Alan Cormack, Sir Aaron Klug, Ralph Bunche and, most recently, J M Coetzee.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
7 hours to complete
Welcome to the course
A warm welcome to Julia Scientific Programming. Over the next four weeks, we will provide you with an introduction to what Julia can offer. This will allow you to learn the basics of the language, and stimulate your imagination about how you can use Julia in your own context. This is all about you exploring Julia - we can only demonstrate some of the capacity and encourage you to take the first steps. For those of you with a programming background, the course is intended to offer a jumpstart into using this language. If you are a novice or beginner programmer, you should follow along the simple coding but recognising that working through the material will not be sufficient to make you a proficient programmer in four weeks. You could see this as the ‘first date’ at the beginning of a long and beautiful new relationship. There is so much you will need to learn and discover. Good luck and we hope you enjoy the course! Best wishes, Henri and Juan
7 hours to complete
16 videos (Total 145 min), 6 readings, 7 quizzes
4 hours to complete
A context for exploring Julia: Working with data
In our case study we use Julia to store, plot, select and slice data from the Ebola epidemic. Taking real data, we explain how to work in Julia using arrays, and for loops to work with the structures. By the end of this module, you will be able to: create an array from data; learn to use the logical structures IF and FOR ; conduct basic array slicing, getting the incidence data and generating total number of cases; use Plots to generate graphs and plot data; and combine the Ebola data outputs to show a plot of disease incidence in several countries.
4 hours to complete
9 videos (Total 74 min), 1 reading, 4 quizzes
3 hours to complete
Notebooks as Julia Programs
in this week, we demonstrate how it is possible to use Julia in the notebook environment to interpret a model and its fit to the data from the Ebola outbreak. For this, we apply the well-known SIR compartmental model in epidemiology. The SIR model labels three compartments, namely S = number susceptible, I =number infectious, and R =number recovered. By the end of this module, you will be able to: understand the SIR models; describe the basic parameters of an SIR model; plot the model-predicted curve and the data on the same diagram; adjust the parameters of the model so the model-predicted curve is close (or rather as close as you can make it) to the data.
3 hours to complete
9 videos (Total 76 min), 1 reading, 3 quizzes
4 hours to complete
Structuring data and functions in Julia
As a scientific computing language, Julia has many applications and is particularly well suited to the task of working with data. In this last module, we will use descriptive statistics as our topic to explore the power of Julia. You should see this week as offering you a chance to further explore concepts introduced in week one and two. You will also be introduced to more efficient ways of managing and visualizing your data. We have also included additional, honors material for those who want to explore further with Julia around functions and collections. By the end of this module, you will be able to: 1. Practice basic functions in Julia 2.Creating random variables from data point values 3. Build your own Dataframes 4. Create a variety of data visualisations 5. Conduct statistical tests 6. Learn how to export your data.
4 hours to complete
9 videos (Total 62 min), 4 readings, 4 quizzes
Reviews
- 5 stars61.40%
- 4 stars26.45%
- 3 stars7.52%
- 2 stars1.69%
- 1 star2.91%
TOP REVIEWS FROM JULIA SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMMING
by MBJul 29, 2020
The course is awesome! I could learn much more than I expected about the Julia Language! I liked also the different contexts and applications shown in the course!
by MKMar 19, 2020
Very good. So interesting and informative. Teaches a lot about Julia programming language and even helps out with describing new models and hand on experience.
by KWMar 16, 2017
A clear and well presented course.
Suitable for newcomers and relatively new users of Julia. The course notes (Jupyter notebooks) are a useful reference after the course.
by NBMay 14, 2021
I thoroughly enjoyed this course. The material is very clear and the exercises were enjoyable. Keen to learn more! It would be great to see an advanced Julia course here!
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