Built-In Data Structures Part 1: Lists and Sets
Python has a rich collection of built-in data structures. These data structures are sometimes called "containers" or "collections" because they contain a collection of individual items. These structures cover a wide variety of common programming situations.
We'll look at an overview of the various collections that are built-in and what problems they solve. After the overview, we will look at the list and set collections in detail in this chapter, and then dictionaries in Chapter 5, Built-In Data Structures Part 2: Dictionaries.
The built-in tuple and string types have been treated separately. These are sequences, making them similar in many ways to the list collection. In Chapter 1, Numbers, Strings, and Tuples, we emphasized the way strings and tuples behave more like immutable numbers than like the mutable list collection.
The next chapter will look at dictionaries, as well...
