Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By : Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By: Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

This Learning Path helps you get comfortable with the world of Python. It starts with a thorough and practical introduction to Python. You’ll quickly start writing programs, building websites, and working with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. With the power of linked lists, binary searches, and sorting algorithms, you'll easily create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. After understanding cooperative inheritance, you'll expertly raise, handle, and manipulate exceptions. You will effortlessly integrate the object-oriented and not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python, and create maintainable applications using higher level design patterns. Once you’ve covered core topics, you’ll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy it is to create unit tests. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have built components that are easy to understand, debug, and can be used across different applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learn Python Programming - Second Edition by Fabrizio Romano • Python Data Structures and Algorithms by Benjamin Baka • Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
8
Stacks and Queues
10
Hashing and Symbol Tables
Index

Linear Search


Let us focus our discussions on linear search, performed on a typical Python list.

The preceding list has elements that are accessible through the list index. To find an element in the list we employ the linear searching technique. This technique traverses the list of elements, by using the index to move from the beginning of the list to the end. Each element is examined and if it does not match the search item, the next item is examined. By hopping from one item to its next, the list is traversed sequentially.

Note

In treating the sections in this chapter and others, we use a list with integers to enhance our understanding since integers lend themselves to easy comparison.

Unordered linear search

A list containing elements 60, 1, 88, 10, and 100 is an example of an unordered list. The items in the list have no order by magnitude. To perform a search operation on such a list, one proceeds from the very first item, compares that with the search item. If a match is not made the next...