Beginning Programming with Python For Dummies

Chapter 10

Interacting with Modules

In This Chapter

Organizing your code

Adding code from outside sources to your application

Locating code libraries on disk

Looking at the library code

Obtaining and reading the Python library documentation

The examples in this book are small, but the functionality of the resulting applications is extremely limited as well. Even tiny real-world applications contain thousands of lines of code. In fact, applications that contain millions of lines of code are somewhat common. Imagine trying to work with a file large enough to contain millions of lines of code — you’d never find anything. In short, you need some method to organize code into small pieces that are easier to manage, much like the examples in this book. The Python solution is to place code in separate code groupings called modules. Commonly used modules that contain source code for generic needs are called libraries.

Modules are contained in separate files. In order to use the module, you ...