Nested dictionaries in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Nested Dictionaries

📖 Scenario: You work at a small bookstore. You want to organize information about books by category and details like author and price.

🎯 Goal: Create a nested dictionary to store book details by category, then print the price of a specific book.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a nested dictionary with categories as keys and dictionaries of books as values

Each book dictionary should have keys 'author' and 'price'

Access nested dictionary values using keys

Print the price of a specific book

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Nested dictionaries help organize complex data like product catalogs, user profiles, or settings grouped by categories.

💼 Career

Understanding nested dictionaries is important for data handling, configuration management, and working with JSON-like data in many programming jobs.

1

Create the nested dictionary

Create a dictionary called bookstore with two categories: 'Fiction' and 'Science'. Each category should be a dictionary with these books and details exactly:
'Fiction': {'The Great Gatsby': {'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'price': 10.99}, '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'price': 8.99}}
'Science': {'A Brief History of Time': {'author': 'Stephen Hawking', 'price': 15.99}, 'The Selfish Gene': {'author': 'Richard Dawkins', 'price': 12.99}}

Python

# Create the nested dictionary called bookstore
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create dictionaries. The value for each category is another dictionary with book titles as keys.

2

Set the category to look up

Create a variable called category and set it to the string 'Fiction'.

Python

bookstore = {
    'Fiction': {
        'The Great Gatsby': {'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'price': 10.99},
        '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'price': 8.99}
    },
    'Science': {
        'A Brief History of Time': {'author': 'Stephen Hawking', 'price': 15.99},
        'The Selfish Gene': {'author': 'Richard Dawkins', 'price': 12.99}
    }
}
# Create a variable called category and set it to 'Fiction'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string 'Fiction' to the variable category.

3

Access the nested dictionary

Create a variable called book and set it to the string '1984'. Then create a variable called price and set it to the price of the book '1984' in the category inside bookstore.

Python

bookstore = {
    'Fiction': {
        'The Great Gatsby': {'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'price': 10.99},
        '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'price': 8.99}
    },
    'Science': {
        'A Brief History of Time': {'author': 'Stephen Hawking', 'price': 15.99},
        'The Selfish Gene': {'author': 'Richard Dawkins', 'price': 12.99}
    }
}
category = 'Fiction'
# Create a variable called book and set it to '1984'
# Create a variable called price and set it to the price of book in category
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to access nested dictionaries: bookstore[category][book]['price'].

4

Print the price

Write a print statement to display the price stored in the variable price.

Python

bookstore = {
    'Fiction': {
        'The Great Gatsby': {'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'price': 10.99},
        '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'price': 8.99}
    },
    'Science': {
        'A Brief History of Time': {'author': 'Stephen Hawking', 'price': 15.99},
        'The Selfish Gene': {'author': 'Richard Dawkins', 'price': 12.99}
    }
}
category = 'Fiction'
book = '1984'
price = bookstore[category][book]['price']
# Print the price variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(price) to show the price.