Mastering Object-oriented Python

Chapter 6. Creating Containers and Collections

We can extend a number of ABCs to create new kinds of collections. The ABCs provide us with design guidelines to extend the built-in containers. These allow us to fine-tune the features or radically define new data structures that fit our problem domain more precisely.

We'll look at the basics of ABC for container classes. There are a fairly large number of abstractions that are used to assemble the Python built-in types, such as list, tuple, dict, set, and frozenset.

We'll review the variety of special methods that are involved in being a container and offering the various features of containers. We'll split these into the core container methods, separate from more specialized sequence, map, and set ...