Introduction Even for someone not interested in computer programming, the usefulness of generating random numbers in certain circumstances is something obvious. In most board games we throw dice to generate an unpredictable number that defines the player’s next move. Also, we can all agree that playing any card game would be pointless without a proper shuffle between rounds. But random numbers are not only important in relatively trivial fields like entertainment or gambling. They’re especially crucial in the field of […]

In my previous article, I explained how the Pandas library can be used for plotting basic and time series plots. While Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn libraries are excellent data plotting libraries, they can only plot static graphs. Static plots are like simple non-interactive images. In most of the cases, static plots are enough to convey the information. However, in some cases you may like to add user interactivity to your plots. In this article, we will see how the Python’s […]

Introduction Collections in Python are containers that are used to store collections of data, for example, list, dict, set, tuple etc. These are built-in collections. Several modules have been developed that provide additional data structures to store collections of data. One such module is the Python collections module. Python collections module was introduced to improve the functionalities of the built-in collection containers. Python collections module was first introduced in its 2.4 release. This tutorial is based on its latest stable […]

Introduction One of the most “obscure” features of Python that almost all Python programmers use, even the beginner ones, but don’t really understand, is context managers. You’ve probably seen them in the form of with statements, usually first encountered when you learn opening files in Python. Although context managers seem a little strange at first, when we really dive into them, understand the motivation and techniques behind it, we get access to a new weapon in our programming arsenal. So […]

What are Iterators? An iterator in Python refers to an object that we can iterate upon. The iterator consists of countable values, and it is possible to traverse through these values, one by one. The iterator simply implements the Python’s iterator protocol. The iterator protocol is a Python class which comes with two special methods, namely __iter__() and __next__(). With these two methods, the iterator is able to compute the next value in the iteration. With iterators, it is easy […]

What are Lambda Functions? In Python, we use the lambda keyword to declare an anonymous function, which is why we refer to them as “lambda functions”. An anonymous function refers to a function declared with no name. Although syntactically they look different, lambda functions behave in the same way as regular functions that are declared using the def keyword. The following are the characteristics of Python lambda functions: A lambda function can take any number of arguments, but they contain […]