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

Pointer structures


Contrary to arrays, pointer structures are lists of items that can be spread out in memory. This is because each item contains one or more links to other items in the structure. What type of links these are dependent on the type of structure we have. If we are dealing with linked lists, then we will have links to the next (and possibly previous) items in the structure. In the case of a tree, we have parent-child links as well as sibling links. In a tile-based game where the game map is built up of hexes, each node will have links to up to six adjacent map cells.

There are several benefits with pointer structures. First of all, they don't require sequential storage space. Second, they can start small and grow arbitrarily as you add more nodes to the structure.

This, however, comes at a cost. If you have a list of integers, each node is going to take up the space of an integer, as well as an additional integer for storing the pointer to the next node.