Book Image

Python Essentials

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Python Essentials

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Python Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. More Complex Data Types

We'll look at a number of built-in and standard library collection types. These collections offer more features than the simple tuple collection. We'll look at the for and while statements which allow us to process the individual items of a collection.

We'll look at some functions which we can use to work with collections of data; these include the map(), filter(), and functools.reduce() functions. By using these, we don't need to write an explicit for statement to process a collection. We'll also look at more specific kinds of reductions such as max(), min(), len(), and sum().

We'll also look at the break and continue statements; these modify a for or while loop to allow skipping items or exiting before the loop has processed all items. This is a fundamental change in the semantics of a collection-processing statement.

The concepts of mutability and immutability are part of understanding how an object behaves. The built-in types in this chapter are all mutable...