Getting Started

If you are coming to Julia from one of the following languages, then you should start by reading the section on noteworthy differences from , R, , C/C++ or . This will help you avoid some common pitfalls since Julia differs from those languages in many subtle ways.

The easiest way to learn and experiment with Julia is by starting an interactive session (also known as a read-eval-print loop or “REPL”) by double-clicking the Julia executable or running from the command line:

To evaluate expressions written in a source file file.jl, write .

To run code in a file non-interactively, you can give it as the first argument to the julia command:

A curated list of useful learning resources to help new users get started can be found on the page of the main Julia website.

You can use the REPL as a learning resource by switching into the help mode. Switch to help mode by pressing ? at an empty julia> prompt, before typing anything else. Typing a keyword in help mode will fetch the documentation for it, along with examples. Similarly for most functions or other objects you might encounter!