December 2014
Intermediate to advanced
606 pages
13h 46m
English
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Chapter 4. Data Types and Structures
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
— Linus Torvalds
This chapter introduces basic data types and data structures of Python. Although the Python interpreter itself already brings a rich variety of data structures with it, NumPy and other libraries add to these in a valuable fashion.
The chapter is organized as follows:
- Basic data types
-
The first section introduces basic data types such as
int,float, andstring. - Basic data structures
-
The next section introduces the fundamental data structures of Python (e.g.,
listobjects) and illustrates control structures, functional programming paradigms, and anonymous functions. - NumPy data structures
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The following section is devoted to the characteristics and capabilities of the
NumPyndarrayclass and illustrates some of the benefits of this class for scientific and financial applications. - Vectorization of code
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As the final section illustrates, thanks to
NumPy’s array class vectorized code is easily implemented, leading to more compact and also better-performing code.
The spirit of this chapter is to provide a general introduction to Python specifics when it comes to data types and structures. If you are equipped with a background from another programing language, say C or Matlab, you should be able to easily grasp the differences that Python usage might bring along. The topics introduced here are all important and fundamental for ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.