A "data structure" is a way of organizing information (i.e.: collections of data) Real/Physical world examples: * A list where you add your friend's name and phone number and any other notes one by one as you get them. * A "Contacts" book where you add your friend's names but put them in the appropriate alphabetical section. * A "Rolodex" (or box of index cards) where each person get's their own card. * A grid of columns and rows you draw on graph paper where all names are in the same column, etc. Each of these is a different way to organize or structure the data. AKA: A different data structure. Each has advantages and disadvantages. * Some are easier to get started with (implement). Like the list. * Some are easier to find a name quickly (like the contact book) * Some are easier to add a new person in the middle (like the Rolodex/Index Cards) * Some take up more physical space and are harder to carry around (Like the Rolodex) You choose which to use based on your own criteria. Do you have a small number of people so a little list of 10 is fine? Do you have a large list of people (like 100) where a list would be unwieldly so you buy a little contacts book with alphabetic tabs on the side? Do you add and remove people frequently (like in a business) where a Rolodex is better? Do you need to take the numbers with you (like when you go on vacation) so a little book is better? Or do you only need the numbers when at your desk at work, where a big fat Rolodex is fine?? As far as the built in strings, integers, Booleans, etc.: Programmers generally call those data types, not data structures. Are they technically little data structures? Yeah, maybe. But it's not worth worrying about. Just call those data types and the bigger things data structures. More on reddit.com

Ok, so python specific. What do you think a data structure is? ... This is actually a great question and should have a clear stackoverflow answer to understand the concept. ... In almost every programming language data type simply is the type of data that you would be using.In python we have ... More on stackoverflow.com

After teaching Python a bit, I found that this type of showcases, that lists data types, without mentioning that these aren't actual types, and that they are not limited to these by far, make it harder to explain later the concept of a data type in general, custom types and the "Everything is an object" concept. Since this is a beginner level showcase, it has to be specified that this talks about builtin functions and types associated with them, which is just a drop in the ocean compared to everything in the standard library, and everything in PyPi, and everything that people make on their own. Diving into the article itself, there are several issues that I consider severe: There is no "Number" data type in Python. There are many data types that can be used for numbers. Saying that a set doesn't have an index is misleading. A set isn't ordered so you can't retrieve an item by its ordinal number, but a set is an index the same way a list is an index. A dict isn't made up of key pairs, but key+value pairs. Dicts are ordered, by insertion order. Dicts are mutable Both dict and set don't require the keys to be different. In fact, they can be the same, as long as the hash() function is different. As demonstrated in the code snippet below, and provided output: class Liar: def __init__(self, value): self.value = value def __repr__(self): return f"Liar('{self.value}')" def __str__(self): return self.value def __eq__(self, other): return self.value == other.value def __hash__(self): return id(self) my_set = set() my_dict = {} liar1 = Liar("foo") liar2 = Liar("foo") print(f"{(liar1==liar2)=}") my_set.add(liar1) my_set.add(liar2) print(f"{my_set=}") my_dict[liar1] = 1 my_dict[liar2] = 2 print(f"{my_dict=}") (liar1==liar2)=True my_set={Liar('foo'), Liar('foo')} my_dict={Liar('foo'): 1, Liar('foo'): 2} This is a common misconception across developers, who learned from incorrect sources like these ones, and end up causing bugs in code. More on reddit.com

Just because python has good built in data types doesn't mean you can't experiment with linked lists, binary trees, hash tables and all that. You wouldn't use your code in real-world solutions, of course, but you can implement basic data structures and get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses. More on reddit.com