Book Image

The Python Workshop

By : Olivier Pons, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Graham Lee, Corey Wade
Book Image

The Python Workshop

By: Olivier Pons, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Graham Lee, Corey Wade

Overview of this book

Have you always wanted to learn Python, but never quite known how to start? More applications than we realize are being developed using Python because it is easy to learn, read, and write. You can now start learning the language quickly and effectively with the help of this interactive tutorial. The Python Workshop starts by showing you how to correctly apply Python syntax to write simple programs, and how to use appropriate Python structures to store and retrieve data. You'll see how to handle files, deal with errors, and use classes and methods to write concise, reusable, and efficient code. As you advance, you'll understand how to use the standard library, debug code to troubleshoot problems, and write unit tests to validate application behavior. You'll gain insights into using the pandas and NumPy libraries for analyzing data, and the graphical libraries of Matplotlib and Seaborn to create impactful data visualizations. By focusing on entry-level data science, you'll build your practical Python skills in a way that mirrors real-world development. Finally, you'll discover the key steps in building and using simple machine learning algorithms. By the end of this Python book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Python.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

List Methods

As discussed before, since a list is a type of sequence, it supports all sequence operations and methods.

Lists are one of the best data structures to use. Python provides a set of list methods that makes it easy for us to store and retrieve values in order to maintain, update, and extract data. These common operations are what Python programmers perform, including slicing, sorting, appending, searching, inserting, and removing data.

The best way to understand this is to see them at work. You will learn about these handy list methods in the following exercises.

Exercise 25: Basic List Operations

In this exercise, you are going to use the basic functions of lists to check the size of a list, combining lists and duplicating lists as well. Follow these steps:

  1. Open a new Jupyter notebook.
  2. Type the following code
    shopping = ["bread","milk", "eggs"]
  3. The length of a list is found using the len function.
    print(len(shopping...