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)

Learning about tuples

Tuples are immutable sequences of arbitrary objects. A tuple is a comma-separated sequence of values; however, it is common practice to enclose them in parentheses. Tuples are very useful when we want to set up multiple variables in one line, or to allow a function to return multiple values of different objects. Tuple is an ordered sequence of items similar to the list data type. The only difference is that tuples are immutable; hence, once created they cannot be modified, unlike list. Tuples are indexed by integers greater than zero. Tuples are hashable, which means we can sort lists of them and they can be used as keys to dictionaries.

We can also create a tuple using the built-in function: tuple(). With no argument, this creates an empty tuple. If the argument to tuple() is a sequence then this creates a tuple of elements of that sequence. It is important...