Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 9: Real Estate Analysis App
Lecture: Finding the most expensive house via lambda expressions

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0:00 Ok so we've gotten our data out of the comma separated value file,
0:03 converted it into our purchase class
0:06 and we've got it a list of those and we are passing it to the query data method,
0:11 now in this method we are supposed to answer 4 basic questions,
0:14 what is the most expensive house,
0:16 what is the least expensive house,
0:18 what is the average price of a house
0:21 and what is the average price of a two bedroom house.
0:23 So some of these are really easy to answer,
0:26 some of them take a little bit more work.
0:28 So if we say data '.'
0:30 PyCharm knows it's been able to detect
0:33 that we are sending a list and it's retracted back from the load data
0:37 back to the main method and down into here
0:39 and says I know I know that you are sending a list
0:41 but it's not quite sure what type is on the inside,
0:45 notice when I go and pull it out I get nothing,
0:48 we can actually give PyCharm a type hint,
0:51 if we want and it doesn't affect the way it runs
0:55 but will give us some help
0:58 and we can say this is a list of purchase objects,
1:00 now if I say data '.' again we get our list stuff
1:05 but if I go to individual item you can see we have our baths, beds and so on.
1:08 So that might make things a little bit easier, ok,
1:10 so the question is what is the most expensive house,
1:14 what is the least expensive house,
1:15 now if I could tell you that data
1:19 so we can say if data was sorted by price,
1:23 it would be really easy to get the most expensive
1:26 and least expensive purchase
1:27 so we could say high_purchase = and this is a list,
1:32 remember, if it was sorted form low to high,
1:35 high purchase would be the last one,
1:37 so we can just say minus 1,
1:39 this is a beautiful thing about Python,
1:41 and let me move this over like so,
1:44 and the low purchase would just be data zero.
1:47 Again, we are assuming there is some data this would crash if data is empty,
1:51 but how do we sort it, well, that's super easy,
1:55 we could go over here and we could say data
1:57 there is two ways we can do this,
2:00 we can do one which will modify the data list
2:03 and one which would return a copy that is sorted but it doesn't affect data itself.
2:08 Let's assume we just want to sort this one in place
2:11 so then we can say sort notice, we can specify a key,
2:15 so we can say this, we can say the key I want you to sort by is something,
2:21 now let me write something that might seem a little weird here to you,
2:24 say def get_price().
2:27 And we'll give it a purchase,
2:28 so if we are given a purchase we could say return p.price.
2:32 So if I go down here and say get_price
2:35 and I don't call it but I just say the method name,
2:38 when it's time to sort, when it's time to get the key to sort on,
2:42 the list here will actually call this function on each element,
2:45 that function will return the price of whatever the list passes to it
2:50 and then it will do a sort on that new subset of data that projection of data.
2:54 So let's see if this is going to work,
2:56 let's just do a print of high price.price,
3:00 and down here we'll do a print, we'll do a better print in a moment,
3:03 but say low price.price.
3:06 Remember, this should be like 800,000ish, this should be 1,500.
3:09 Let's find out.
3:11 Well, it looks like my cool little trick to get the type hints here isn't working so well,
3:17 let's take that away again.
3:19 Excellent so you can see we've got the high priced house,
3:22 and the low priced house and all we had to do is sort our list.
3:27 However, this is not the coolest thing to write this function here
3:30 so that we can pass it off to the key method,
3:33 wouldn't it be better if we could just put a little bit of code here
3:37 that talks about how to get the price from a purchase,
3:41 well, luckily, Python can do that, we can go over here and say key,
3:45 instead of giving an existing method that we have written
3:48 either a class method or just a regular method,
3:51 we can just say I am going to create something called a lambda
3:54 and a lambda is like a little inline method,
3:56 and so we'll say given a purchase I would like to return the price, that's it,
4:01 and we go over here and we can comment this out,
4:03 we don't need that anymore,
4:05 and let's try to run it and see if we still get the same information.
4:08 Perfect, so anytime you have to pass a function around
4:11 and by the way how cool is that you can pass functions around,
4:14 anytime you have to pass a function around,
4:17 if the function is sufficiently small we can just say
4:19 here is our little small function an inline function, lambda,
4:22 this is the argument, there can be mini arguments like p, u, x, whatever, right,
4:28 given this argument which is a purchase
4:31 that's because the data list contains purchases
4:34 given this we are going to go and return some value
4:37 that will then be used to sort, so we are going to return a price,
4:40 and there is kind of an implicit return here, right,
4:42 you don't say return, you just say there is kind of an expression,
4:45 this piece of data goes to that value.
4:47 So let's just like make this output a little bit nicer here,
4:50 we'll say print the most expensive house is
4:57 so here we've cleaned it up,
4:59 the most expensive house is 884,000 dollars
5:02 and the least expensive house is 1,551
5:06 maybe we want to say little more information about it,
5:09 like with some number of bedrooms and some number of baths,
5:14 because we are using our class this is super easy we just say beds baths,
5:21 4 beds, 3 baths, we can do something very similar, for the least expensive.
5:29 What do you guys think, is that a good deal,
5:31 1,500 dollars for a 3 bedroom 3 bath house,
5:34 I have no idea what happened there,
5:36 let's take a moment and look at this core concept of lambda expressions
5:39 and then we'll go on to answer the more interesting question
5:42 that involve little bit more math.