Python Data Types and Structures

Data structures and algorithms are important components in the development of any software system. An algorithm can be defined as a set of step-by-step instructions to solve any given problem; an algorithm processes the data and produces the output results based on the specific problem. The data used by the algorithm to solve the problem has to be stored and organized efficiently in the computer memory for the efficient implementation of the software. The performance of the system depends upon the efficient access and retrieval of the data, and that depends upon how well the data structures that store and organize the data in the system are chosen.

Data structures deal with how the data is stored and organized in the memory of the computer that is going to be used in a program. Computer scientists should understand how efficient an algorithm is and which data structure should be used in its implementation. The Python programming language is a robust, powerful, and widely used language to develop software-based systems. Python is a high-level, interpreted, and object-oriented language that is very convenient to learn and understand the concepts of data structures and algorithms.

In this chapter, we briefly review the Python programming language components that we will be using to implement the various data structures discussed in this book. For a more detailed discussion on the Python language in broader terms, take a look at the Python documentation:

• https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html
• https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

• Introducing Python 3.10
• Installing Python
• Setting up a Python development environment
• Overview of data types and objects
• Basic data types
• Complex data types
• Python’s collections module