• Tuples are immutable sequence types

  • Literal syntax is optional parentheses around a comma-separated list.

  • Notable syntax for single element tuples utilizing the trailing comma.

  • Tuple unpacking - useful for multiple return values and swapping

• Strings

  • String concatenation is most efficiently performed with the join() method rather than the addition or augmented assignment operators.

  • The partition() method is a useful and elegant string parsing tool.

  • The format() method provided a powerful means of replacing placeholders with stringified values.

• Ranges

  • The range objects represent arithmetic progressions.

  • The enumerate() built-in function is often a superior alternative to range() for generating loop counters

• Lists

  • Lists support indexing from the end of the list with negative indices

  • Slice syntax allows us to copy all, or part, of a list.

  • The full slice is a common Python idiom for copying lists, although the copy() method and list() constructor are less obscure.

  • List (and other collection) copies in Python are shallow copies. References are copied, but the referenced objects are not.

• Dictionaries map from keys to values

  • Iteration and membership testing with dictionaries is done with respect to the keys.

  • The keys(), values() and items() methods provide views onto the different aspects of a dictionary, allowing convenient iteration.

• Sets store an unordered collection of unique elements.

  • Sets support powerful set-algebra operations and predicates.

  • The built in collections are can be organized according to which protocols they support, such as iterable, sequence and mapping.

In passing we have also discovered that:

• Underscore is commonly used for dummy or superfluous variables

• The pprint module supports pretty printing of compound data structures.

Back in Python 2 days range() was a function which returned a list. The Python 3 version of range is much more efficient, useful and powerful. This, of course, brings to mind the classic joke: The two hardest problems in programming are naming, cache coherence, and off-by-one errors. Arguably, it's poor design to have a module containing functions of the same name, because of this issue.