Python’s built-in data structures—lists, dictionaries, sets, and tuples—are the backbone of effective coding. Each offers unique strengths, from ordered mutability to lightning-fast lookups.

Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

Defining a list in Python is easy—just use the bracket syntax to indicate items in a list, like this: list_of_ints = [1, 2, 3] Items in a list do not have to all be the same type; they can be any ...