Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

You’ve seen that lists are useful when you want to group values into a structure and refer to each value by number. In this chapter, you learn about a data structure in which you can refer to each value by name. This type of structure is called a mapping. The only built-in mapping type in Python is the dictionary. The values in a dictionary don’t have any particular order but are stored under a key, which may be a number, a string, or even a tuple.

Dictionary Uses

The name dictionary should give you a clue about the purpose of this structure. An ordinary book is made for reading from start to finish. If you like, you can quickly open it to any ...