Week 9 — Lists
Welcome to your Week 9 Start Here page.
Why this matters
A biology major logging a week of plant heights and a small-business owner keeping orders in the order they came in both keep a row of values under one name, and both need to know whether a change shows up everywhere.
In plain language
So far every value in your programs has lived in its own variable, one name per number or string. This week you meet a list (one name that holds a whole row of values, in order), so seven days of reading fit under a single name. You will read any item (one value in the list) by its position, cut out pieces, and change the list after you make it, which a string never allowed. You will also learn the one surprise that trips up almost everyone: giving a list a second name does not make a second list. As always, you predict what each program prints and then run it to check.
- Already covered: loops, accumulators, and functions that hand back None.
- This week: lists, slices, list methods, aliases and copies, and a loop trap.
- How they connect: a list is indexed like a string and walked with a for loop.
- Where we're going next: Week 10, Tuples, Dictionaries & Sets.
Focus
How do you keep a whole row of values under one name, and know when a change shows up under another name?
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
- [ ] read a list by index and slice it
- [ ] predict what each list method hands back
- [ ] tell an alias from a copy
To-do
Plan your week
- Read Chapter 9 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
- Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
- Do the Coding Lab (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
- Take the quiz.
This week's checkpoint: predict what a second name for a list shows after a change, then run it to check.
You've got this
Predict, then run, and ask your instructor if a step snags.
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