Code Clinic - HL7 Lab - Book 1: Welcome to the HL7 Lab

Your first look at a real hospital message. The book opens with why Python has become the language people reach for in healthcare, then puts an HL7 message on the page and explains the mission: one long line of text, divided into segments, moving a patient's details from one system to another. A quick review brings your data types, your lists and your dictionaries back to the front of your mind, and then the new tools arrive. Sets, which hold only unique items, so a run of repeated identifiers collapses to the ones that matter. Nested lists, lists living inside other lists, which is the shape a message takes once every segment becomes a list of its own fields. List comprehensions, the one-line pattern that filters and transforms a list without writing a loop. Nested dictionaries, with the chained access that reaches a value two levels down in a single expression. The closing chapter gives you a first taste of parsing, taking one record apart with the tools you have just picked up.

Twenty-four A4 pages, in full color. Written in short sentences and plain English, for readers whose first language is not English and clearer for everyone else because of it.

Every code example in this book was run before the page was printed, so the output you read is the output you get. Instant PDF download. By M.R. Sterling.