Python All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Speeding Along with Lists and Tuples

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining lists

Working with lists

Understanding tuples

Checking out sets

Sometimes in code you work with one item of data at a time, such as a person’s name or a unit price or a username. Other times, you work with larger sets of data, such as a list of people’s names or a list of products and their prices. These sets of data are often referred to as lists or arrays in most programming languages.

Python has lots of easy, fast, and efficient ways to deal with all kinds of data collections, as you discover in this chapter. As always, we encourage you to follow along in a Jupyter notebook or .py file. The “doing” part helps with the “understanding” part.

Defining and Using Lists

The simplest data collection in Python is a list. We provided examples of these in the preceding chapter. A list is any list of data items, separated by commas, inside square brackets. Typically, you assign a name to the list using an = character, just as you would with variables. If the list contains numbers, don't use quotation marks around ...