Introduction

Python has a rich collection of built-in data structures. A great deal of useful programming is commonly done with these built-in structures. These collections cover a variety of common situations.

We'll look at an overview of the various structures that are available and what problems they solve. From there, we can look at lists, dictionaries, and sets in detail.

Note that we've set the built-in tuple and string aside as being different from the list structure. There are some important similarities as well as some differences. In Chapter 1, Numbers, Strings, and Tuples, we emphasized the way strings and tuples behave more like immutable numbers than mutable collections.

We'll also look at some more advanced topics related to how python handles references to objects. We'll look at some issues related to the mutability of these data structures, as well.