Sometimes when you’re working with several different dictionaries, you need to group and manage them as a single one. In other situations, you can have multiple dictionaries representing different scopes or contexts and need to handle them as a single dictionary that allows you to access the underlying data following a given order or priority. In those cases, you can take advantage of Python’s ChainMap from the collections module. ChainMap groups multiple dictionaries and mappings in a single, updatable view […]

When you’re loading many strings into Pandas, you’re going to use a lot of memory. If you have only a limited number of strings, you can save memory with categoricals, but that’s only helpful in a limited number of situations. With Pandas 1.3, there’s a new option that can save memory on large number of strings as well, simply by changing to a new column type. Let’s see how. Pandas’ different string dtypes Every pandas.Series, and every column in a […]

In this section, you’ll look at three popular frameworks for building REST APIs in Python. Each framework has pros and cons, so you’ll have to evaluate which works best for your needs. To this end, in the next sections, you’ll look at a REST API in each framework. All the examples will be for a similar API that manages a collection of countries. The fields name, capital, and area store data about a specific country somewhere in the world. Most […]

Python’s collections module provides a rich set of specialized container data types carefully designed to approach specific programming problems in a Pythonic and efficient way. The module also provides wrapper classes that make it safer to create custom classes that behave similar to the built-in types dict, list, and str. Learning about the data types and classes in collections will allow you to grow your programming tool kit with a valuable set of reliable and efficient tools. In this tutorial, […]

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. In this tutorial we’ll be answering the question “How do I setup a Django (1.5, 1.6, 1.7, or 1.8) project from scratch?” In other words, you’ll learn how to install Django and how to set up your Django project structure. Here’s how you can make the most of this tutorial: Read over the Introduction and Setup sections. Then choose your poison – Django 1.5, 1.6, […]