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

Graph traversal


Since graphs don't necessarily have an ordered structure, traversing a graph can be more involving. Traversal normally involves keeping track of which nodes or vertices have already been visited and which ones have not. A common strategy is to follow a path until a dead end is reached, then walking back up until there is a point where there is an alternative path. We can also iteratively move from one node to another in order to traverse the full graph or part of it. In the next section, we will discuss breadth and depth-first search algorithms for graph traversal.

Breadth-first search

The breadth-first search algorithm starts at a node, chooses that node or vertex as its root node, and visits the neighboring nodes, after which it explores neighbors on the next level of the graph.

Consider the following diagram as a graph:

The diagram is an example of an undirected graph. We continue to use this type of graph to help make explanation easy without being too verbose.

The adjacency...