(my apologies if you really are bob or suegenerically or otherwise*each record is list of four propertiesnameagepayand job fields to access these fieldswe simply index by positionthe result is in parentheses here because it is tuple of two resultsbob[ ]sue[ ('bob smith' fetch namepay processing records is easy with this representationwe just use list operations for examplewe can extract last name by splitting the name field on blanks and grabbing the last partand we can give someone raise by changing their list in-placebob[ split()[- what' bob' last name'smithsue[ * give sue raise sue ['sue jones' 'hardware'the last-name expression here proceeds from left to rightwe fetch bob' namesplit it into list of substrings around spacesand index his last name (run it one step at time to see howstart-up pointers since this is the first code in this bookhere are some quick pragmatic pointers for referencethis code may be typed in the idle guiafter typing python at shell prompt (or the full directory path to it if it' not on your system path)and so on the characters are python' prompt (not code you type yourselfthe informational lines that python prints when this prompt starts up are usually omitted in this book to save space ' running all of this book' code under python results in any release should be similar (barring unforeseeable python changesof courseapart from some system and integration codemost of this book' examples are run under windows though thanks to python portabilityit generally doesn' matter unless stated otherwise if you've never run python code this way beforesee an introductory resource such as 'reilly' learning python for help with getting started 'll also have few words to say about running code saved in script files later in this noi' serious in the python classes teachi had for many years regularly used the name "bob smith,age and jobs "developerand "manageras supposedly fictitious database record--until class in chicagowhere met student named bob smithwho was and was developer and manager the world is stranger than it seems step representing records