Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Built-In Data Structures Part 2: Dictionaries

Python has a rich collection of built-in data structures. These data structures are sometimes called "containers" or "collections" because they contain a collection of individual items. These structures cover a wide variety of common programming situations.

In this chapter, we'll build on some of the basics introduced in Chapter 4, Built-In Data Structures Part 1: Lists and Sets. This chapter covers the dictionary structure. This is a mapping from keys to values, sometimes called an associative array.

This chapter will also look at some more advanced topics related to how Python handles references to mutable collection objects. This has consequences in the way functions need to be defined.

In this chapter, we'll look at the following recipes, all related to Python's built-in data structures:

  • Creating dictionaries – inserting and updating
  • Removing items...