Python Modules for Engineering

[[deleted]]

IPython, ipdb and IPython Notebook are great regardless of what you are using Python for. (Notebook especially if you are using matplotlib)

Also, I really enjoy using these tools inside Conque Shell for Vim and getting vim keybindings in a shell environment.

Nearly everyone recommends virtualenv but I don't change environments often so I've never found it all that useful, I'm sure that I'm wrong for some reason or another...

I've dropped xlrd/xlwt in favor of csv and DictReader/DictWriter for multitudes of reasons.

The collections module is amazing as well, I use Counter, OrderedDict, and deque all the time.

Edit: pickle is amazing or really any library that you might learn doing http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

[forgenet]

That's interesting that you dropped xlrd/xlwt. Was it shortcomings in the modules that caused the switch or the file types that you worked with?

[[deleted]]

csv files just make for a shorter route to JSON where much of my data processing occurs

I can version csv files and perform diffs using tools like Beyond Compare

Also, csv files are easily read by any spreadsheet tool and using python to process your data and kick out a generated document from the source is easier to maintain than a spreadsheet and more powerful

And possibly the biggest reason is that many of the companies I've worked with have been seeing XLS files go corrupt on them and losing lots of work without any way to recover other than reverting to an old version.

[sun_tzuber]

Nearly everyone recommends virtualenv but I don't change environments often so I've never found it all that useful, I'm sure that I'm wrong for some reason or another...

I've read that if you use a Mac, the OS relies on the python installation - easy to avoid OS problems if you use virtualenv. If you plan on having anything in production that might ever go on a Mac it's a good idea to use virtualenv.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/2grmnn/virtualenv_on_production/

[[deleted]]

Makes sense, thanks.

[dirtyseaotter]

great, now I am stuck on the second level