This is a 5 minute tutorial showing you how to write highly readable and structured lists. Your new skills will allow you to take any list and quickly transform it into something accessible and useful. If you haven’t already done so, please take a look at our introductory tour which gives you a good overview of what can be achieved.

Lists are made from four basic components; maps, lists, nests and blocks. Do not worry if you do not soak it all up the first time. When you get around to creating your lists you will be given a basic working example which you can copy and customise for your own purposes. So, let’s begin!

Suppose we have a book, we can represent it as follows:

The bit to the left of the colon is called a key and everything to the right is its value. The key is unique, it’s an index to fetch the value. So, in the above example, “title” would give the value “The New Market Wizards” and “author” would give the value “Jack D Schwager”. Each key:value pair is called a map.

If by mistake we try to define the same key twice, the last value is used. For example, in the following, we define the book title twice. The title is incorrectly set to “The Richest Man in Babylon”.

So how do we represent more than one book? Let’s go to minute two.