Built-In Data Types

"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."

– Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Everything you do with a computer is managing data. Data comes in many different shapes and flavors. It's the music you listen to, the movies you stream, the PDFs you open. Even the source of the chapter you're reading at this very moment is just a file, which is data.

Data can be simple, whether it is an integer number to represent an age, or complex, like an order placed on a website. It can be about a single object or about a collection of them. Data can even be about data—that is, metadata. This is data that describes the design of other data structures, or data that describes application data or its context. In Python, objects are our abstraction for data, and Python has an amazing variety of data structures that you can use to represent data or combine them to create your own custom data.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following:

• Python objects' structures
• Mutability and immutability
• Built-in data types: numbers, strings, dates and times, sequences, collections, and mapping types
• The collections module
• Enumerations