Free Programming Ebooks - 20 Python Libraries You Aren't Using (But Should)

The Python ecosystem is vast and far-reaching in both scope and depth. Starting out in this crazy, open-source forest is daunting, and even with years of experience, it still requires continual effort to keep up-to-date with the best libraries and techniques. This report helps you explore some of the lesser known Python libraries and tools, including third-party modules and several extremely useful tools in the standard library that deserve more attention.

What makes this collection different from other lists online? Author Caleb Hattingh diligently spent time finding and testing hidden gems that fit several criteria: easy to install and use, cross-platform, applicable to more than one domain, and not yet popular but likely to become so soon. You will likely discover at least a couple of cool libraries that will assist you in your everyday Python activities, no matter your specialization.

This report examines:

• Little-known standard library modules: collections, contextlib, concurrent.futures, logging, and sched
• Flit for simplifying the process of submitting a Python package to the Python Package Index (PyPI)
• Colorama and begins for making your command-line applications friendlier for users
• Pyqtgraph and pywebview for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
• Watchdog, psutil, and ptpython for working closely with the operating system
• Hug for exposing APIs for other users' programs to consume
• Arrow and parsedatetime for working with dates and times
• Third-party general-purpose libraries: Boltons, Cython, and the awesome-python curated list

Caleb Hattingh has been using Python professionally for 15 years in a variety of applications, including chemical engineering simulations, hotel-management software, and web services for GPS tracking. Caleb volunteers as a mentor at CoderDojo, Software Carpentry, and Django Girls, and has created codermoji.com to provide a different framework for learning to code. Caleb has also recorded an extensive video course on Cython (titled Learning Cython) for O’Reilly Media.