Fundamentals of Python: Data Structures

Book Preface

What You’ll Learn

The book covers four major aspects of computing:

• Programming basics—Data types, control structures, algorithm development, and program design with functions are basic ideas that you need to master to solve problems with computers. You’ll review these core topics in the Python programming language and employ your understanding of them to solve a wide range of problems.
• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)—Object-Oriented Programming is the dominant programming paradigm used to develop large software systems. You’ll be introduced to the fundamental principles of OOP so that you can apply them successfully. Unlike other textbooks, this book helps you develop a professionalquality framework of collection classes to illustrate these principles.
• Data structures—Most useful programs rely on data structures to solve problems. At the most concrete level, data structures include arrays and various types of linked structures. You’ll use these data structures to implement various types of collection structures, such as stacks, queues, lists, trees, bags, sets, dictionaries, and graphs You’ll also learn to use complexity analysis to evaluate the space/time trade-offs of different implementations of these collections.
• Software development life cycle—Rather than isolate software development techniques in one or two chapters, this book deals with them throughout in the context of numerous case studies. Among other things, you’ll learn that coding a program is often not the most difficult or challenging aspect of problem solving and software development.