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

Singly linked lists


A singly linked list is a list with only one pointer between two successive nodes. It can only be traversed in a single direction, that is, you can go from the first node in the list to the last node, but you cannot move from the last node to the first node.

We can actually use the node class that we created earlier to implement a very simple singly linked list:

>>> n1 = Node('eggs')
    >>> n2 = Node('ham')
    >>> n3 = Node('spam')

Next we link the nodes together so that they form a chain:

>>> n1.next = n2
    >>> n2.next = n3

To traverse the list, you could do something like the following. We start by setting the variable current to the first item in the list:

    current = n1
    while current:
        print(current.data)
        current = current.next 

In the loop we print out the current element after which we set current to point to the next element in the list. We keep doing this until we have reached the end of the list.

There...