Lecture outline for Python Lists/Dicts talk

lecture.md

Lists:

• Making lists with stuff in them

Item Access

• access just like strings!
• O-indexed
• assignment with list[index] syntax, touch on mutability ("this can be changed, strings can't")

Length

• also just like strings!

Iteration

• Assume class has seen for/while before, provide examples with lists

Concatenation

• +

Containment

• in

Methods

• .append()
• .pop()
• .sort()

Dicts

• Making dicts with stuff in them
• Talk about how they aren't ordered

Item Access

• access looks like lists and strings!, but is a little bit different.
• assignment is kind of like with lists, but you can add whole items!

Iteration

• example of iteration over keys
• introduce .keys() and .values() by way of iteration examples

Containment

• in

Boundaries and Exceptions

Lists

• Accessing items out of bounds: What happens? How can we decide whether to try accessing a certain index?
• len to the rescue!

Dicts

• Accessing items that aren't present: What happens? How can we decide whether to try accessing a certain index?
• .get() and in to the rescue!

Shall we cover enumerate?

It's useful but... a large number of python programmers seem to go years without learning about enumerate

If we were teaching in ruby I would definitely cover each_with_index, but in python it's a little obscure. We'd also have to talk about tuple unpacking, which might or might not be worth it.

little late, but FWIW I agree with @inlinestyle. I rarely use enumerate and typically see it enforcing C or Java patterns that are ideally avoided in Python.

this outline looks great. good work!