Python Tutorial : Building with built-ins

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/writing-efficient-python-code at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Python comes with a number of built-in components that you can think of as a "batteries included" concept. Although these aren't exhaustive, they give us more than enough to start using Python out-of-the-box. Let's explore a few built-in components that help write efficient Python code. Built-in components are referred to as the Python Standard Library. This library comes with every Python installation and is commonly cited as one of Python's greatest strengths. Python has a number of built-in types. We'll be focusing on specific data structure types like lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries. Python also comes with built-in functions that provide a variety of problem-solving features. Listed here are a few of the built-in functions we'll discuss and use in the course. It's worth noting that Python's built-ins have been optimized to work within the Python language itself. Therefore, we should default to using a built-in solution (if one exists) rather than developing our own. Let's explore some notable built-in functions; starting with range. This is a handy tool whenever we want to create a sequence of numbers. Suppose we wanted to create a list of integers from zero to ten. We could explicitly type out each integer, but that is not very efficient. Instead, let's use range to accomplish this task. We can provide range with a start and stop value to create this sequence. Or, we can provide just a stop value assuming that we want our sequence to start at zero. Notice that the stop value is exclusive, or up to but not including this value. Also note the range function returns a range object, which we can convert into a list and print. range can also accept a start, stop, and step value (in that order). In this block of code, we tell rang