Hello again! This lesson's topic is Sorted Maps (or Sorted Dicts). Similar to dictionaries, Sorted Maps are data structures that store key-value pairs but in an ordered manner. Learning about Sorted Maps enriches our set of tools for organized and efficient data manipulation. Today's goal is to work with Sorted Maps using the Python sortedcontainers library.

In Python, we differentiate between standard dictionaries and Sorted Maps. Comparing regular dictionaries to Sorted Maps is akin to comparing a messy bookshelf to a well-organized library — the latter maintains order. Although Python natively does not include Sorted Maps, we'll leverage an external library, sortedcontainers.

The sortedcontainers library is a Python package that offers a Sorted List, Sorted Set, and Sorted Dict. Unlike regular collections, sorted collections maintain an order for their elements, which can be valuable for many algorithms and applications. Today, we'll utilize the SortedDict class from sortedcontainers, a dictionary that sorts its keys.

To create a SortedDict object, pass a dictionary or any key-value pair iterable, ensuring that the keys are immutable. For instance: