Python for Absolute Beginners Transcripts
Chapter: Using external Python packages
Lecture: Introducing PyPI, the Python Package Index
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When you want to work with an external library stuff that doesn't come prepackaged with Python the best place to start is pypi.org.
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This is the Python Package Index. And here you can see when I took this screenshot it was 206,000 projects. That wasn't very long ago
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and it's already over 215,000 projects available. These are 215,000 external libraries. Each of which, maybe does something really awesome.
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Some of them are web frameworks others are graphing libraries others still are maybe genetics libraries that'll process
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well known genetics file shown common applications and do analysis on them for you. There is just this huge variety of what is here
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and we talked briefly about this at the practice section of the last chapter. But just in case you didn't see that one Python's Package Index, PyPI
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is where we're going to go to get these external libraries that we're going to work with. You can install them outside of this place
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like directly off of GitHub and stuff but this is really nice because the built in tools look here if there's an update it will automatically grab it
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and upgrade it for you if you ask it to. Stuff like that. The big challenge of this is it's something like the paradox of choice
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or the cursed of abundance I don't know whatever you want to call it here. If you go and type in like web crawling there's 10,000 plus results.
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How do you know which one of those 10,000 is popular and which one you want to use? I don't think PyPI actually ranks stuff by popularity
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when it shows the results. So that's that's kind of unfortunate. So anyway, how do you narrow this down? Well there's a lot of ways.
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One of the options, if it has the right category for you is to use something called awesomePython.com. You can come over here
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and see the table of contents on the right. If you're doing, I don't know, caching or authentication or audio work or whatever it is
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you can click on one of those categories and here it'll show you a big long list of the popular and recommended projects from that category.
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There might be 500 admin panels but there might be only 10 listed here. The way they get on here is they have to be pretty highly used
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and recommended by multiple people, things like that. So this will help you narrow it down in the case that they have a category for it.
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If they don't, then, you know have to just search the internet and see what people are recommending for the packages. But there are some many packages
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and using them in Python it's totally easy.