[Merrill]

In section "1.2 Setup and Interface" there is a very short description of the REPL and how it can be downloaded from julialang.org, as well as a much longer description of JuliaBox and how Jupyter notebooks can be run from juliabox.com for free.

Although JuliaBox has been provided for free by Julia Computing, there has been discussion that this may not be possible in the future. However, Julia Computing does provide a distribution of Julia, the Juno IDE, and supported packages known as JuliaPro for free.

For new users, would the free JuliaPro distribution be a good alternative to JuliaBox and/or downloading the REPL and kernal from julialang.org?

[improbable22]

No, I think you should simply download the ordinary version. Jupyter, Juno, etc. are easy enough to install locally. I forget the precise details, but I think JuliaPro comes with certain versions of packages, and it's less confusing just to get the latest of what you need (using the built-in package manager).

JuliaBox (and https://nextjournal.com/) are cloud services, but if you have a real computer and want to do this for more than a few minutes, just install it. (There's also no need for virtualenv etc.)