Think Julia

Chapter 13. Case Study: Data Structure Selection

At this point you have learned about Julia’s core data structures, and you have seen some of the algorithms that use them.

This chapter presents a case study with exercises that let you think about choosing data structures and practice using them.

Word Frequency Analysis

As usual, you should at least attempt the exercises before you read my solutions.

Exercise 13-1

Write a program that reads a file, breaks each line into words, strips whitespace and punctuation from the words, and converts them to lowercase.

The function isletter tests whether a character is alphabetic.

Exercise 13-2

Go to Project Gutenberg and download your favorite out-of-copyright book in plain text format.

Modify your program from the previous exercise to read the book you downloaded, skip over the header information at the beginning of the file, and process the rest of the words as before.

Then modify the program to count the total number of words in the book, and the number of times each word is used.

Print the number of different words used in the book. Compare different books by different authors, written in different eras. Which author uses the most extensive vocabulary?

Exercise 13-3

Modify the program from the previous exercise to print the 20 most frequently used words in the book.

Exercise 13-4

Modify the previous program to read a word list and then print all the words in the book that are not in the word list. How many of them are typos? ...