Dictionary use cases in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Dictionary use cases

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small bookstore's inventory. You want to keep track of book titles and their quantities using a dictionary.

🎯 Goal: Build a Python program that creates a dictionary of books and quantities, sets a minimum stock threshold, finds books below that threshold, and prints them.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with exact book titles and quantities

Create a variable for minimum stock threshold

Use a dictionary comprehension to find books with stock below the threshold

Print the resulting dictionary of low stock books

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Managing inventory in stores or warehouses often uses dictionaries to track items and quantities.

💼 Career

Understanding dictionary operations is essential for data handling, filtering, and reporting in many programming jobs.

1

Create the book inventory dictionary

Create a dictionary called inventory with these exact entries: 'Python Basics': 12, 'Data Science 101': 5, 'Machine Learning': 3, 'Deep Learning': 7, 'AI for Beginners': 2

Python

# Create the inventory dictionary with exact book titles and quantities
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys as book titles and values as quantities.

2

Set the minimum stock threshold

Create a variable called min_stock and set it to 5 to represent the minimum acceptable stock level.

Python

inventory = {
    'Python Basics': 12,
    'Data Science 101': 5,
    'Machine Learning': 3,
    'Deep Learning': 7,
    'AI for Beginners': 2
}
# Create min_stock variable and set it to 5
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 5 to a variable named min_stock.

3

Find books with stock below the threshold

Use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dictionary called low_stock_books that contains only the books from inventory with quantities less than min_stock. Use for book, qty in inventory.items() in your comprehension.

Python

inventory = {
    'Python Basics': 12,
    'Data Science 101': 5,
    'Machine Learning': 3,
    'Deep Learning': 7,
    'AI for Beginners': 2
}
min_stock = 5
# Create low_stock_books dictionary using comprehension
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use {key: value for key, value in dict.items() if condition} format for dictionary comprehension.

4

Print the low stock books

Write a print statement to display the low_stock_books dictionary.

Python

inventory = {
    'Python Basics': 12,
    'Data Science 101': 5,
    'Machine Learning': 3,
    'Deep Learning': 7,
    'AI for Beginners': 2
}
min_stock = 5
low_stock_books = {book: qty for book, qty in inventory.items() if qty < min_stock}
# Print the low_stock_books dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(low_stock_books) to show the dictionary.