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)

Set and Dictionary Comprehensions

List comprehensions are handy ways in which to concisely build sequences of values in Python. Other forms of comprehensions are also available, which you can use to build other collection types. A set is an unordered collection: you can see what elements are in a set, but you cannot index into a set nor insert an object at a particular location in the set because the elements are not ordered. An element can only be present in a set once, whereas it could appear in a list multiple times.

Sets are frequently useful in situations where you want to quickly test whether an object is in a collection but do not need to track the order of the objects in the collection. For example, a web service might keep track of all of the active session tokens in a set, so that when it receives a request, it can test whether the session token corresponds to an active session.

A dictionary is a collection of pairs of objects, where one object in the pair is called...