Python is known for its batteries-included philosophy. You have access to all kinds of very powerful tools by using the rich libraries and modules available. Python also has many built-in functions that do not require you to import them before using them. There are well over 50 included, but we’ll take a look at some of the more commonly used built-in functions in this tutorial. We’ll take a look at python functions such as len(), range(), list(), min(), max(), round(), abs(), pow(), sorted(), split(), type(), and isinstance().…

Logical operators in Python are used for testing conditional statements that are either true or false. It is how we can make decisions about what to do next in the code. Logical operators in Python are and, or and not. The first two look at two operands and make a conclusion. For example, with the and operator, you have a True value if both the operands are true.…

Sorting data is probably the most common tasks you’ll need to do in your programs. As a user of many different online applications, you are sorting data every day. Every single shopping website allows you to sort the data. For example, you can sort by lowest price, highest price, number of customer reviews, average review score, and so on. It doesn’t matter if its Amazon, Target, Barnes n Noble, or the Lego store.…

Recursion is the process of a function calling itself from within its own code. You can think of it as another way to accomplish a looping construct. The recursion pattern appears in many scenarios in the real world, and we’ll cover some examples of recursion in Python here. A recursive function just keeps calling itself until it has completed the problem at hand. That brings up a good point, and that is to make sure that your recursive function actually terminates and returns at some point.…

In the last tutorial, we had a look at some common programming algorithms. A companion to these algorithms is a set of common data structures. Programming algorithms need to work with data and that data is often contained in specific formats or data structures. Now is a good time to learn more about these common data structures that are used when creating various algorithms. The purpose of data structures is to organize information in ways that make it easy to be operated on by algorithms.…

To better understand the concept of algorithms in computer programming, let’s imagine that we have a group of various shapes. You may have some circle shapes, oval shapes, squares, rectangles, triangles, and so on. Your goal is to group these various shapes into several different sets. To organize these shapes with a computer program, maybe you could set up a loop that iterates over all of the shapes and determines what shape it is on each iteration.…

A class is the basis of all data in Python, everything is an object in Python, and a class is how an object is defined. They are the foundation of object-oriented programming and represent real-world things you want to model in your programs. You use a class to instantiate objects, which are specific instances of a class. If you had a House class, you might create a colonial object, a contemporary object, or a log cabin object from that base class.…