APPENDIX A: Downloading and Installing Julia and IJulia
You can download the latest versions of Julia at this site: http://bit.ly/2a6CtMi.
Just like other pieces of software, it has a stable version and an experimental one (nightly builds). We highly recommend that you go with the former, as the latter can be buggy and does not necessarily give you any significant advantages. So, unless you want to test a new package at the next popular version of the language while it is being developed, you have no reason to play around with the nightly builds.
Also, make sure that you download the installer that corresponds to your computer’s OS and its internal data transference bandwidth (64 bits for most computers today and 32 bits for the older ones). Once you download the installer, just run it and follow these instructions: http://bit.ly/29qh7XQ.
Although Julia exists as a package in the Linux system, this is bound to be an earlier version of the language. To get the latest (stable) version, you’ll need to access the corresponding repositories: ppa:staticfloat/juliareleases and ppa:staticfloat/julia-deps for Ubuntu-based systems.
The vanilla flavor of Julia (which is the one shown first on the official website) is basic but you can still do a lot with it. This form of the language is called REPL (which stands for Read, Evaluate, Print and Loop), and is particularly handy for basic tasks and for running scripts you have already written in a text editor or an IDE.
Speaking of IDEs, the Julia creators promote Juno and offer it as a bundle with Julia. Juno is currently somewhat unstable, even though Atom itself works fine.
For getting IJulia on your system, things get a bit trickier. Although the package itself is fine, one of its dependencies (Zero MQ, or ZMQ in the Julia universe) may or may not build properly on your system. To avoid any unnecessary back-and-forths with this, we strongly recommend you avoid the conventional approach to packages for this one and do the following instead:
- 1. Install ipython on your computer
- 2. Install ipython-notebook on your computer
- 3. Run Julia
- 4. Add the IJulia package
- 5. Build the package (Pkg.build(“IJulia”)).
Afterward, you can access the IJulia environment on your browser using the following commands:
using IJulia
IJulia.notebook()