What You Should Know Now — and What's Next

What You Should Know Now

• How to work in notebooks, the Wolfram Cloud, and wolframscript
• That everything is an expression — and how FullForm reveals its structure
• Exact and approximate numbers, lists, strings, and associations
• Defining functions, pure functions, Map, Apply, and Fold
• Patterns, rules, and replacement — the heart of the language
• Symbolic algebra, equation solving, calculus, and linear algebra
• Plotting, interactive Manipulate controls, and exporting results
• Importing data and querying it with Dataset
• Scoping with Module, Block, and With, and controlling evaluation
• Entities, units, packages, performance, cloud APIs, and testing

What Should You Learn Next?

• Your field in depth — the Wolfram Language is usually learned for something: physics, engineering, finance, education, or research. Explore the Documentation Center's guide pages for your area.
• Python — Python is the most common companion for data work and production systems; the Wolfram Client Library connects the two.
• Julia — Julia shares the focus on fast scientific computing, in an open-source language.
• MATLAB — MATLAB dominates numerical engineering and is worth knowing if you work with engineers.

Build Something

Pick a question you're curious about — the orbit of a planet, the growth of your savings, the words in your favorite book — and answer it in a notebook that mixes text, code, and plots. Publish it to the Wolfram Cloud and share the link.