Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

By : Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

By: Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka

Overview of this book

Data structures allow you to store and organize data efficiently. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python teaches you the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms for building easy and maintainable applications. This book helps you to understand the power of linked lists, double linked lists, and circular linked lists. You will learn to create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. As you make your way through the chapters, you will explore the application of binary searches and binary search trees, along with learning common techniques and structures used in tasks such as preprocessing, modeling, and transforming data. In the concluding chapters, you will get to grips with organizing your code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. You will also study how to bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and merge sort algorithms in detail. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications. You will get insights into Python implementation of all the important and relevant algorithms.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Beginning with dictionaries

In Python, the Dictionary data type is one of the most popular and useful data types. A dictionary stores the data in a mapping of key and value pair. Dictionaries are mainly a collection of objects; they are indexed by numbers, strings, or any other immutable objects. Keys should be unique in the dictionaries; however, the values in the dictionary can be changed. Python dictionaries are the only built-in mapping type; they can be thought of as a mapping from a set of keys to a set of values. They are created using the {key:value} syntax. For example, the following code can be used to create a dictionary that maps words to numerals using different methods:

>>>a= {'Monday':1,'Tuesday':2,'Wednesday':3} #creates a dictionary 
>>>b =dict({'Monday':1 , 'Tuesday': 2, 'Wednesday'...