Please provide a better explanation of tuples and dictionaries

[Daniel W. Rouse Jr.]

"Chris Angelico" <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1197.1359515470.2939.python-list at python.org...
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Daniel W. Rouse Jr.
> <dwrousejr at nethere.comnospam> wrote:
>> I am currently using "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz and David Ascher,
>> published by O'Reilly (ISBN 1-56592-464-9)--but I find the explanations
>> insufficient and the number of examples to be sparse. I do understand 
>> some
>> ANSI C programming in addition to Python (and the book often wanders off
>> into a comparison of C and Python in its numerous footnotes), but I need 
>> a
>> better real-world example of how tuples and dictionaries are being used 
>> in
>> actual Python code.
>
> Have you checked out the online documentation at
> http://docs.python.org/ ? That might have what you're looking for.
>
I'll check the online documentation but I was really seeking a book 
recommendation or other offline resource. I am not always online, and often 
times when I code I prefer local machine documentation or a book. I do also 
have the .chm format help file in the Windows version of Python.

> By the way, you may want to consider learning and using Python 3.3
> instead of the older branch 2.7; new features are only being added to
> the 3.x branch now, with 2.7 getting bugfixes and such for a couple of
> years, but ultimately it's not going anywhere. Obviously if you're
> supporting existing code, you'll need to learn the language that it
> was written in, but if this is all new code, go with the recent
> version.
>
Honestly, I don't know what code is being supported. I've just seen enough 
test automation requirements calling for Python (in addition to C# and perl) 
in some of the latest job listings that I figured I better get some working 
knowledge of Python to avoid becoming obsolete should I ever need to find 
another job.