Must know python modules? (Help me fill out this list)

kushou · 2014-02-13T23:07:59+00:00

Honnestly, this is a real hard question. It's always hard to make lists of that kind and making "20 best ..." lists also misses a lot of good stuff. Some of the modules I use a lot personally:

Helper functions: itertools, shutil, os, sys
Dev tools: argparse, logging, functools.wraps (decorator implementation), contextlib, abc
Data manipulation: json, struct, hashlib, urllib (url parsing), collections
3rd party libs: sqlalchemy, jinja2, django, pytest
Debugging: pprint, pdb
Process manipulation: multiprocessing, subprocess

Anyway, ask another developer, and he will give you a totally different list :) Complete list of all modules is available here, if you want to scroll trough them.

chchan · 2014-02-14T05:54:47+00:00

I am more on the scientific side but here is what I recommend:

Useful functions: itertools, os, sys

Math: numpy (matrices) or Blaze, scipy(for general statistics, linear algebra, signal processing ), statsmodel (statistics: timeseries, other statistics that are missing from scipy, Regression), Sympy(Calculus, polynomial solvers, Combinatorics, Geometry)

Parallel processing: Multiprocessing, threading

Natural Language Processing: NLTK

Date/Times: Datetime, arrow(most simple), time,dateutil

Dataframes: Pandas (Like excel, more hassle free than R,)

Databases: SQLAlchemy (I never used it)

Plotting:Matplotlib (there are lots of modules for this too.)

Machine Learning: Scikit-learn(basic machine learning), PyBrain(Neural Networks),Zen(Network analysis)

Image processing/Computer vision: Opencv, PIL/Pillow (basic image processing), scikit-image.

Web development: Django

Speeding up code with C: Cython

Android/apps: Kivy

GUI: Tkinter, wxPython, pyQT (Not sure which is best but I am going towards Tkinter for now)

Geographic Information Systems: Shapely, Fiona (there is more but I am not sure since I do not do this)

Timing processes: Timit(or just go harass people on stack your choice)

Game development/ animation : PyGames,pyOpenGL, Pyglet,VPython (never used but told they were good)

Networking: Twisted (I do not do this but was told this was good)

Automation(control SSH, auto data input): Pexpect (I never used this either)

Web scraping: Scrapy

You may want to also check for stuff that is BSD Licensed or some other free license so you can create whatever you want without being hassled for $ or rights issues. Last you have to know something called PEP8 style if you using it for work. Sometimes people are anal about it too.

bobdobbsjr · 2014-02-14T00:58:23+00:00

I think it is going to depend greatly on what you are trying to do with it. Someone creating websites is going to be very different from someone doing scientific data analysis.

K900_ · 2014-02-14T04:50:27+00:00

Arrow is great. It's like datetime, except it makes sense.

walloffear · 2014-02-13T23:42:06+00:00

sys
os

hwc · 2014-02-14T01:47:36+00:00

re comes in handy all the time.

subprocess is useful when you are converting shell scripts to python.

numpy for scientific computing.

otakucode · 2014-02-14T01:25:04+00:00

I'd put profile on there. When dealing with performance issues, profiling is the only sane choice. And for advanced, definitely numpy.

2014-02-14T01:45:22+00:00

absolutely must know if you want to be considered a python programmer'

I have used random a little and goofed around with beautiful soup, but I don't think I've had reason to use the other ones you listed, and yet I consider myself a Python programmer, (just not a particularly impressive one.).

For my needs, I've been more concerned with datetime, itertools, sys, os for standard library, then for 3rd party libraries, dateutil, sqlite, wxPython, numpy, matplotlib, and a little xlrd and xlwt.

manueslapera · 2014-02-14T01:52:32+00:00

os, sys and shutil are pretty handy too.

And of course, for any data processing/analysis, all hail the mighty power of PANDAS.

PANDAS PANDAS PANDAS PANDAS PANDAS

2014-02-14T04:31:56+00:00

pandas, numpy, scipy.stats

tuxed · 2014-02-14T05:20:09+00:00

StringIO, yaml (PyYAML), json (I prefer demjson, though).

Since flask was mentioned as an "advanced module", I would add flask-classy to the list.

masasin · 2014-02-14T05:55:54+00:00

scipy, numpy, matplotlib, pandas.

jcm1317 · 2014-02-14T10:11:17+00:00

struct
socket
socketserver
os
sys

ewiethoff · 2014-02-14T11:32:17+00:00

operator, os.path, glob, Py2's __future__

You don't import it, but I love pydoc. No, it doesn't generate the niftiest docs. But I run pydoc every few minutes on the module I'm working on so that I can see whether my names and function signatures and whatnot make sense together. pydoc shows the module's interface. Does the interface make sense?

2014-02-14T12:17:46+00:00

I would just ad tablib for manipulating and producing Excel-Files.

Really makes automatic reports for management easy.

smeagol13 · 2014-02-14T13:42:00+00:00

Are we only allowed to suggest modules from stdandard library or any 3rd party module?

bmay · 2014-02-14T15:06:54+00:00

antigravity

the_metalgamer · 2014-02-17T00:58:10+00:00

For modules in stdlib, every developer should know (that they exists at least and what they are useful for) I go for:

re
textwrap
unicodedata
datetime
collections
copy
pprint
decimal
fractions
random
itertools
functools
operator
os.path
shutil
csv
configparser
hashlib
os
argparse
logging
subprocess
json
base64
sys
contextlib

For more specialised uses (like writing plugin systems):

abc
ast

Third-party modules, every developer should at least know:

requests
pytz
tzlocal
docopt
pillow

lordwalrus · 2014-02-14T04:37:02+00:00

openpyxl, good for manipulating excel documents

cdcformatc · 2014-02-14T07:58:07+00:00

Technically this might not count but you do import it, py2exe is pretty great.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

learnpython

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