‫Let's talk about our next developer fundamentals.
‫And this one is understanding data structures.
‫A really good programmer is a programmer that is able to decide what data structure to use when.
‫Up until now, we've learned about dictionaries and lists and we'll learn about a couple more throughout
‫the course.
‫But a really good programmer, a programmer who's experienced, is able to understand what the tradeoffs
‫are, when to use what.
‫And although I can give you a list of this is when you should do this and this is when you should use
‫maybe dictionaries.
‫The thing is, this takes practice and experience.
‫So throughout our course and then the exercises that we're going to do, the projects we're going to
‫build at the end, I hope that this idea of understanding when to use what data structure makes sense
‫to you.
‫But let's go back to our example.
‫When should you use a list and when should you use a dictionary?
‫Well, the first thing we have to realize that a dictionary is not sorted, right?
‫A list has order, it has zero one indexes, so on and so forth.
‫A dictionary has no order.
‫So maybe if you want to have a list of people in line your shop, well, you should probably use a list,
‫but maybe you have a user that is playing a game and that user has first name, maybe weapons, maybe
‫an H that doesn't have to be ordered.
‫So you might use a dictionary.
‫Also, you'll notice that dictionaries hold more information than lists.
‫Right?
‫Because lists only have that single value.
‫That is a list, has the index, and then whatever the value is.
‫And here we have a dictionary inside of a list which is holding a lot of information.
‫Deep down, a list is simply an index and some sort of value here.
‫Right.
‫Versus a dictionary that holds a lot more information.
‫It holds a key.
‫So this could be the weapons of that user.
‫Hello.
‫Can be the greeting of that user.
‫Maybe is.
‫Magic is another information about that user.
‫So we're able to have both keys and values in a dictionary.
‫So it holds a lot more information.
‫And as we learn different data structures, you'll have these different pros and cons, you'll start
‫to understand as to when to use what.
‫All right.
‫There's another developer fundamentals I'll see in the next one.
‫Bye bye.