20 Python Libraries You Aren't Using (But Should)

Chapter 1. Expanding Your Python Knowledge: Lesser-Known Libraries

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.

In this report we take a look at some of the lesser-known Python libraries and tools. Python itself already includes a huge number of high-quality libraries; collectively these are called the standard library. The standard library receives a lot of attention, but there are still some libraries within it that should be better known. We will start out by discussing several, extremely useful tools in the standard library that you may not know about.

We’re also going to discuss several exciting, lesser-known libraries from the third-party ecosystem. Many high-quality third-party libraries are already well-known, including Numpy and Scipy, Django, Flask, and Requests; you can easily learn more about these libraries by searching for information online. Rather than focusing on those standouts, this report is instead going to focus on several interesting libraries that are growing in popularity.

Let’s start by taking a look at the standard library.

The Standard Library

The libraries that tend to get all the attention are the ones heavily used for operating-system interaction, like sys, os, shutil, and to a slightly lesser extent, glob. This is understandable because ...