Exercises
The best way to learn how to choose the correct data structure is to do it wrong a few times (intentionally or accidentally!). Take some code you've recently written, or write some new code that uses a list. Try rewriting it using some different data structures. Which ones make more sense? Which ones don't? Which have the most elegant code?
Try this with a few different pairs of data structures. You can look at examples you've done for previous chapter exercises. Are there objects with methods where you could have used dataclasses, namedtuple, or dict instead? Attempt both and see. Are there dictionaries that could have been sets because you don't really access the values? Do you have lists that check for duplicates? Would a set suffice? Or maybe several sets? Would one of the queue implementations be more efficient? Is it useful to restrict the API to the top of a stack rather than allowing random access to the list?
Have you written...
