Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By : Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By: Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

This Learning Path helps you get comfortable with the world of Python. It starts with a thorough and practical introduction to Python. You’ll quickly start writing programs, building websites, and working with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. With the power of linked lists, binary searches, and sorting algorithms, you'll easily create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. After understanding cooperative inheritance, you'll expertly raise, handle, and manipulate exceptions. You will effortlessly integrate the object-oriented and not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python, and create maintainable applications using higher level design patterns. Once you’ve covered core topics, you’ll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy it is to create unit tests. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have built components that are easy to understand, debug, and can be used across different applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learn Python Programming - Second Edition by Fabrizio Romano • Python Data Structures and Algorithms by Benjamin Baka • Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
8
Stacks and Queues
10
Hashing and Symbol Tables
Index

Chapter 11. Graphs and Other Algorithms

In this chapter, we are going to talk about graphs. This is a concept that comes from the branch of mathematics called graph theory.

Graphs are used to solve a number of computing problems. They also have much less structure than other data structures we have looked at and things like traversal can be much more unconventional, as we shall see.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

  • Understand what graphs are
  • Know the types of graphs and their constituents
  • Know how to represent a graph and traverse it
  • Get a fundamental idea of what priority queues are
  • Be able to implement a priority queue
  • Be able to determine the ith smallest element in a list