Python for Absolute Beginners Transcripts
Chapter: Using external Python packages
Lecture: Introducing PyPI, the Python Package Index
Login or
purchase this course
to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:00
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.
0:09
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
0:16
and it's already over 215,000 projects available. These are 215,000 external libraries. Each of which, maybe does something really awesome.
0:27
Some of them are web frameworks others are graphing libraries others still are maybe genetics libraries that'll process
0:34
well known genetics file shown common applications and do analysis on them for you. There is just this huge variety of what is here
0:41
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
0:49
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
0:56
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
1:03
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
1:10
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.
1:20
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
1:28
when it shows the results. So that's kind of unfortunate. So anyway, how do you narrow this down? Well there's a lot of ways.
1:35
One of the options, if it has the right category for you is to use something called awesomePython.com. You can come over here
1:43
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
1:50
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.
1:59
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
2:06
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.
2:13
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
2:19
and using them in Python it's totally easy.