Organizing collections of data

We introduced some data collections earlier in the chapter. It's time to come clean on what these collections are and how we can use them effectively. As we observed in Chapter 1, Our Espionage Toolkit, Python offers a tower of different types of numbers. The commonly used numbers are built in; the more specialized numbers are imported from the standard library.

In a similar way, Python has a number of built-in collections. There is also a very large number of additional collection types available in the standard library. We'll look at the built-in lists, tuples, dictionaries, and sets. These cover the essential bases to work with groups of data items.

Using a Python list

The Python list class can be summarized as a mutable sequence. Mutability means that we can add, change, and remove items (the list can be changed). Sequence means that the items are accessed based on their positions within the list.

The syntax is pleasantly simple; we put the data items in [...