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)

Collections

You read about built-in collections in Chapter 2, Python Structures. You saw list, dict, tuple, and set, but sometimes, those collections are not enough. The Python standard library comes with modules and collections that provide a number of advanced structures that can greatly simplify our code in common situations. Now, you will explore how you can use counters, defauldict, and chainmap.

Counters

A counter is a class that allows us to count hashable objects. It has keys and values as a dictionary (it actually inherits from dict) to store objects as keys and the number of occurrences in values. A counter object can be created either with the list of objects that you want to count or with a dictionary that already contains the mapping of objects to their count. Once you have a counter instance created, you can get information about the count of objects, such as getting the most common ones or the count of a specific object.

Exercise 95: Counting Words in a Text...