Best Python packages?

[Ben Sizer]

Although the standard library in Python is great, there are
undoubtedly some great packages available from 3rd parties, and I've
encountered a few almost by accident. However, I don't know how a user
would become aware of many of these. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/
presumably lists most of the decent ones, but there's a lot there and
little indication as to quality or popularity - great if you know
exactly what you need, but not so great for just browsing. I'd love to
have some way of finding out what hidden gems are out there in the
Python world which could make my development a lot easier. Any
suggestions?

--
Ben Sizer

[Fredrik Lundh]

Ben Sizer wrote:

make my development a lot easier.

Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course. Some
libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...

Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
a good idea. For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
to enthought.com. If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
Django applications use. Etc.

</F>

[Dennis Cote]

Ben Sizer wrote:

I'd love to have some way of finding out what hidden gems are out
there in the Python world

If they were easy to find, they wouldn't be "hidden gems". :-)

Dennis Cote

[Larry Bates]

Ben Sizer wrote:

Although the standard library in Python is great, there are
undoubtedly some great packages available from 3rd parties, and I've
encountered a few almost by accident. However, I don't know how a user
would become aware of many of these. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/
presumably lists most of the decent ones, but there's a lot there and
little indication as to quality or popularity - great if you know
exactly what you need, but not so great for just browsing. I'd love to
have some way of finding out what hidden gems are out there in the
Python world which could make my development a lot easier. Any
suggestions?

--
Ben Sizer

Hang around this list for a little while and these "hidden gems" will become
more apparent.

-Larry

[Russ P.]

On Jul 16, 7:16 am, Ben Sizer <kylo...@gmail. comwrote:

Although the standard library in Python is great, there are
undoubtedly some great packages available from 3rd parties, and I've
encountered a few almost by accident. However, I don't know how a user
would become aware of many of these.http://pypi.python.org/pypi/
presumably lists most of the decent ones, but there's a lot there and
little indication as to quality or popularity - great if you know
exactly what you need, but not so great for just browsing. I'd love to
have some way of finding out what hidden gems are out there in the
Python world which could make my development a lot easier. Any
suggestions?

--
Ben Sizer

One good place to look is The Python Papers, "a free e-journal,
including industry and academic articles" at

http://pythonpapers.org/

The current issue (vol. 3, issue 1) has an article that I wrote
called, "An Efficient Scalar Package in Python." If you do engineering
or scientific computing with Python, and you wish to avoid unit errors
without slowing down your production runs, then I suggest take a look
at this package.

You can download it and its user's guide at http://RussP.us/scalar.htm
..

[Ben Sizer]

On Jul 16, 3:31*pm, Fredrik Lundh <fred...@python ware.comwrote:

Ben Sizer wrote:

make my development a lot easier.

Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course. *Some
libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...

Sure. Mostly I'm just interested in what's out there though. In C++
you have Boost which everybody knows are a source of high quality
libraries, covering a fairly wide set of applications. Obviously
that's more low-level and less application specific, and the Python
standard libs do pretty much everything that is in Boost, but it's
that sort of peer-reviewed and widely-applicable list that I'd like to
see.

I (attempt to) use TurboGears for web development and that depends on
a whole bunch of libraries - SQLObject, PyProtocols, RuleDispatch,
SimpleJson, FormEncode, etc - and I would never have heard of these if
TurboGears' exposure of its internals wasn't so common. Some of these
are web-specific but some are not. And I'd never know to look for them
specificially, because in many cases it wouldn't occur to me that they
exist. (eg. Object-Relational Mappers like SQLObject may be obvious if
you come from certain areas of IT, but I'd never heard of them before
I started with TurboGears.)

For what it's worth, my main areas of interest are gaming, multimedia,
and web development. But I just like to hear about anything that
people might use which makes their life a lot easier and which perhaps
is not application specific - like ORMs or something similar.

Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
a good idea. *For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
to enthought.com. *If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
Django applications use. *Etc.

Sadly, I know just as little about what major applications are out
there as I do about what libraries are out there!

--
Ben Sizer

[Iain King]

On Jul 18, 11:23*am, Ben Sizer <kylo...@gmail. comwrote:

On Jul 16, 3:31*pm, Fredrik Lundh <fred...@python ware.comwrote:

Ben Sizer wrote:

make my development a lot easier.

Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course. *Some
libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...

Sure. Mostly I'm just interested in what's out there though. In C++
you have Boost which everybody knows are a source of high quality
libraries, covering a fairly wide set of applications. Obviously
that's more low-level and less application specific, and the Python
standard libs do pretty much everything that is in Boost, but it's
that sort of peer-reviewed and widely-applicable list that I'd like to
see.

I (attempt to) use TurboGears for web development and that depends on
a whole bunch of libraries - SQLObject, PyProtocols, RuleDispatch,
SimpleJson, FormEncode, etc - and I would never have heard of these if
TurboGears' exposure of its internals wasn't so common. Some of these
are web-specific but some are not. And I'd never know to look for them
specificially, because in many cases it wouldn't occur to me that they
exist. (eg. Object-Relational Mappers like SQLObject may be obvious if
you come from certain areas of IT, but I'd never heard of them before
I started with TurboGears.)

For what it's worth, my main areas of interest are gaming, multimedia,
and web development. But I just like to hear about anything that
people might use which makes their life a lot easier and which perhaps
is not application specific - like ORMs or something similar.

Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
a good idea. *For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
to enthought.com. *If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
Django applications use. *Etc.

Sadly, I know just as little about what major applications are out
there as I do about what libraries are out there!

--
Ben Sizer

Well, if you're looking for a list of excellent 3rd party Python
libraries, then I can give you the ones I like and use a lot:
wxPython : powerful GUI library which generates native look &
feel
PIL : Imaging Library - if you need to manipulate bitmaps
pyGame : SDL for python
BeautifulSoup : for real-world (i.e. not-at-all-recommendation-
compliant) HTML processing

Iain

[Stefan Behnel]

Iain King wrote:

Well, if you're looking for a list of excellent 3rd party Python
libraries, then I can give you the ones I like and use a lot:

[...]

BeautifulSoup : for real-world (i.e. not-at-all-recommendation-
compliant) HTML processing

You forgot lxml.html, which is much faster, more memory friendly and more
feature-rich than BS.

Stefan

[Iain King]

On Jul 19, 8:56 am, Stefan Behnel <stefan...@behn el.dewrote:

Iain King wrote:

Well, if you're looking for a list of excellent 3rd party Python
libraries, then I can give you the ones I like and use a lot:

[...]

BeautifulSoup : for real-world (i.e. not-at-all-recommendation-
compliant) HTML processing

You forgot lxml.html, which is much faster, more memory friendly and more
feature-rich than BS.

Stefan

Never heard of it :)

Iain

[Kay Schluehr]

On 18 Jul., 12:23, Ben Sizer <kylo...@gmail. comwrote:

On Jul 16, 3:31 pm, Fredrik Lundh <fred...@python ware.comwrote:

Ben Sizer wrote:

make my development a lot easier.

Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course. Some
libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...

Sure. Mostly I'm just interested in what's out there though. In C++
you have Boost which everybody knows are a source of high quality
libraries, covering a fairly wide set of applications. Obviously
that's more low-level and less application specific, and the Python
standard libs do pretty much everything that is in Boost, but it's
that sort of peer-reviewed and widely-applicable list that I'd like to
see.

I (attempt to) use TurboGears for web development and that depends on
a whole bunch of libraries - SQLObject, PyProtocols, RuleDispatch,
SimpleJson, FormEncode, etc - and I would never have heard of these if
TurboGears' exposure of its internals wasn't so common. Some of these
are web-specific but some are not. And I'd never know to look for them
specificially, because in many cases it wouldn't occur to me that they
exist. (eg. Object-Relational Mappers like SQLObject may be obvious if
you come from certain areas of IT, but I'd never heard of them before
I started with TurboGears.)

For what it's worth, my main areas of interest are gaming, multimedia,
and web development. But I just like to hear about anything that
people might use which makes their life a lot easier and which perhaps
is not application specific - like ORMs or something similar.

Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
a good idea. For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
to enthought.com. If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
Django applications use. Etc.

Sadly, I know just as little about what major applications are out
there as I do about what libraries are out there!

--
Ben Sizer

In the original post you asked for "hidden gems" and now it seems you
just want to know about Madonna or Justin Timberlake.

Maybe a look on this collection helps

http://wiki.python.org/moin/UsefulModules