Accessing values using keys in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Accessing values using keys

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small library system. You have a dictionary that stores book titles as keys and their authors as values.

🎯 Goal: You will create a dictionary of books and authors, then access the author of a specific book using its title as the key.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called library with exact book titles and authors

Create a variable called book_title with the exact book title to look up

Access the author of the book using the book_title key from the library dictionary

Print the author name

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Dictionaries are used to store and look up data quickly, like finding a book's author by its title in a library system.

💼 Career

Understanding how to access values using keys is essential for data handling in many programming jobs, including web development, data analysis, and software engineering.

1

Create the library dictionary

Create a dictionary called library with these exact entries: 'The Hobbit': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', '1984': 'George Orwell', 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Jane Austen'

Python

# Create the library dictionary with book titles and authors
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys and values separated by colons.

2

Set the book title to look up

Create a variable called book_title and set it to the string '1984'

Python

library = {'The Hobbit': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', '1984': 'George Orwell', 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Jane Austen'}
# Create the variable book_title with the value '1984'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an equals sign = to assign the string '1984' to the variable book_title.

3

Access the author using the book title key

Create a variable called author and set it to the value from the library dictionary using the key stored in book_title

Python

library = {'The Hobbit': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', '1984': 'George Orwell', 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Jane Austen'}
book_title = '1984'
# Access the author from library using book_title as the key
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] with the dictionary name and the key variable inside to get the value.

4

Print the author

Write a print statement to display the value stored in the variable author

Python

library = {'The Hobbit': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', '1984': 'George Orwell', 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Jane Austen'}
book_title = '1984'
author = library[book_title]
# Print the author
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(author) to show the author's name on the screen.