Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: What is Python?
Lecture: Python's 200k+ external packages
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It's worth taking just a moment
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to look a little bit farther at this concept
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of the larger Python ecosystem
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the Python packages and so on.
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Here we are at PyPI
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the Python Package Index
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and notice there are 206,248 different projects.
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These are web frameworks.
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These are data science tools.
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All kinds of things.
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It's really hard to appreciate the power of Python
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until you spend a little time seeing what is
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available in somewhere like this.
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Let's suppose that you are a biologist.
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Well, you type in biology and see
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oh, look, there are 800 different libraries
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for working with biology.
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Maybe I want to be focused on genetics.
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500 different projects on genetics.
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What if you're into quantitative analysis
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as an economist or a trader?
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Extra quant, 313.
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The top one, enterprise architecture
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for quantitative analysis and finance.
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If you need to build something around quantitative analysis
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you could start from absolutely scratch
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or you could come over here even dig in to this
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I'll show us what to do and come down here
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and it talks about what it is.
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And it says how do you get started.
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Pip install quant and then off you go.
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You start working with it and so on.
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You got to read the documentation
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to figure out how that works.
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What about web? What can do with the web?
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Oh, there's over 10,000, probably
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just, we're not counting anymore.
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Though there's an incredible amount of stuff
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so Flask is one of the frameworks we'll work with.
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We can come down here
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and it tells you a little bit about it.
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It says the way you install it
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is you pip install flask.
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This is something you type
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at the Terminal or Command line
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to install and manage these libraries.
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There's other ways to do it
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but this is the most foundational one, I guess.
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It says, Here's a simple example.
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With those five lines of code
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literally just those five lines
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you can create a web server
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doesn't do much, you go to it, it says, Hello world!
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But literally, that's a functional
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web application in Python.
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You can even see them running, running down here
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you could go get it. You also can get a sense
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of how popular these are, so number of stars.
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This is really nice to know.
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Is this highly used and highly maintained
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or is it kind of in the back waters of this area?
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And maybe if you start using it
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you kind of have to, you know
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take over some of the development
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or at least there's not going to be
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that much out there to help, right?
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So the more popular, generally the better
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but when you are over here
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if you have 800 choices for biology
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or you have literally over 200,000 projects
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it's hard to know if there are 10,000 of these things
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where should I start? Which one's good?
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You can't just spend your time working on that.
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So I'll tell you about one more place, while we're here.
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There's a place called Awesome Python
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and there's many awesome lists.
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This is one of those types of things.
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There's Awesome Python web frameworks
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and asynchronous frameworks
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but here's the most general.
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So let's just look at this really, really quick.
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So you notice over here on the right
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we have a bunch of different categories.
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Maybe I'm interested in cryptography.
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If I click on this it'll say
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Here are four highly popular
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cryptography libraries that you might use.
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For example, Passlib is an awesome library
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for securely storing passwords.
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If you create an account at training.talkpython.fm
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I super-duper encrypted hashed your password
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to store it in the database using Passlib.
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Maybe I have to send some email.
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Let's go over here and see what we can do.
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So here's a bunch of different libraries
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you can use to send email.
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And you click on it, you get some details, github repo
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and all of those sorts of things.
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Places like awesomepython.com are really
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really helpful in determining what are the few
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stand-out packages or libraries for a given area.
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Now that doesn't work perfectly
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because for example, I don't think genetics shows up here.
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It does not! It depends.
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It works well if the category
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you are looking for appears on the right.
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Otherwise, you're kind of out searching
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but still the idea is there are so many
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of these libraries.
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And when people talk about Python
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they absolutely think about all of these
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hundreds of thousands of libraries available
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not just the foundational programming language
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that they type in.
