Ok! Had a nice refreshing break, yesterday being Sunday.
Back to work today!
If today’s notes, feel a little light, that’s because I was struggling with exercises.

Notes

Part 2

  • A lightweight solution to classes, if I am just combining all sorts of data structures is the built-in collections. Some of them could be
    • List of Lists
    • List of Tuples
    • List of Dictionaries
    • Dictionary of Dictionaries
    • Dictionary of Lists
  • Mostly use them to solve tricky issues. If I find myself using lots of functions, just to deal with these structures, I am better off using classes.
    • These structures also lend themselves to being converted into classes.
    • Sometimes it’s just a matter of adding a few methods, et voilà, I have a class!

Lists of lists

  • As simple to create as l = [[1,3,2],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
    • If I do a l[0], I’ll get the first element, the list [1,3,2
    • To get at the elements inside that list, I can go l[0][2] which will give me the number, 3.
    • Behind the scenes, l.__getitem__(0).__getitem__(2)
  • We can either work with them with indices like up above, or iterate over them, with for loops or comprehensions
  • Better to use lists of tuples, if I am dealing with mixed types, specially those that are not apt to change, like records of some sort. Something like a list of details about movies.

Learning / Feedback/ Experiences from doing exercises

  • Learning to think atomically. Learning to break down each exercise into pieces and then learning to organise them in a manner, that I can solve it, step by step.
    • What hints do Reuven’s results show?
    • What should I compare first? What will be the aftermath? and so on.
  • Gave up an exercise after two hours of trying.
    • After peeking at the solution I realised that it was not because of something I forgot or did not practice, but once again, because of something I did not know.
    • in this case that there are set operators to use between two iterator objects.instead of crazily stepping through everything like I did below, I could’ve just created a union list run through them.
  • Just goes to show, there is lots for me to learn. And that there is a lot of tacit knowledge out there. And this I will only be able to figure out by writing lots of code!
  • Also (note to self), time your self and be ok with giving up and looking at the solution. I seem to keep thinking that I am wrong or am missing something. Never the fact, that it might be something that I do not know.
    • I am now strictly going to give myself 30 minutes per exercise and then move on.
  • Lots of mistakes as usual.
    • Wrong indentation, giving weird results.

Read all about my Python advanced data structures journey here