Python: Journey from Novice to Expert

Third-party libraries

Python ships with a lovely standard library, which is a collection of packages and modules that are available on every machine that runs Python. However, you'll soon find that it doesn't contain everything you need. When this happens, you have two options:

• Write a supporting package yourself
• Use somebody else's code

We won't be covering the details about turning your packages into libraries, but if you have a problem you need to solve and you don't feel like coding it (the best programmers are extremely lazy and prefer to reuse existing, proven code, rather than write their own), you can probably find the library you want on the Python Package Index (PyPI) at http://pypi.python.org/. Once you've identified a package that you ...