Master Python Data Structures: Lists, Tuples & Dictionaries

This course shows you exactly what every developer should know about Python lists beyond the beginner stage. You’ll strengthen and deepen your understanding of Python’s core data structures: lists, tuples, dictionaries, and sets, and build real confidence using them in practical code.

Throughout the course, you’ll learn useful tips, discover Pythonic techniques, and work through many hands-on exercises that help you practice the most common and important data-structure tasks.

Target audience

Developers who especially benefit from this course, are:

• beginning programmers with ~6 months Python experience who want to take their coding skills to the next level

• developers who bring experience from another programming language and want to learn how to work with lists in Python

• self-taught Python developers who want to improve their list skills by learning best practices

Challenges

Students that are interested in this course often know basic list features but are not yet aware of Python’s unique language features that allows to write more optimized code. This can lead to verbose or slow code. It is my goal to teach you up-to-date, preferred ways to work with lists in Python and make your code readable, predictable and elegant.

What can you do after this course?

• Make better decisions when to use one of the 4 built-in container types by seeing their specific features.

• Work with lists more efficiently by using Python-specific language features like unpacking, slicing and comprehensions.

• Optimize your existing code after learning that Python offers many built-in common list operations.

Topics

• What is a Container? Container definition and the 4 built-in container types in Python.

• Lists: Create and change lists. Accessing elements, reverse, sort, count elements.

• Tuples: Create and unpack, assign, swap variables, tuples as return type.

• Dictionaries: Dictionary purpose, keys, lookup, iterate.

• Sets: Set purpose, mathematical operations, superset, subset.

• Common operations: Zip, enumerate, all, any, concatenate, check if element is in list.

• Slicing: Slice, head, tail, init, last.

• Comprehensions: Mapping, filtering, flatten, matrix.

Duration

2 hours video time, ~6 hours including practicing exercises.

The teacher

This course is taught by Loek van den Ouweland, a senior software engineer with 25 years of professional experience. Loek is the creator of Wunderlist for windows, Microsoft To-do and Mahjong for Windows and loves to teach software engineering.