Python: Real-World Data Science

Dictionaries

Dictionaries are incredibly useful containers that allow us to map objects directly to other objects. An empty object with attributes to it is a sort of dictionary; the names of the properties map to the property values. This is actually closer to the truth than it sounds; internally, objects normally represent attributes as a dictionary, where the values are properties or methods on the objects (see the __dict__ attribute if you don't believe me). Even the attributes on a module are stored, internally, in a dictionary.

Dictionaries are extremely efficient at looking up a value, given a specific key object that maps to that value. They should always be used when you want to find one object based on some other object. The object that ...