Python is a widely used, high-level, general-purpose, dynamic programming language.
Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than is possible in languages like C++ or Java. The language provides constructs intended to enable the writing of clean programs of both small and large scale. Below are the top 5 Python libraries that you may have overlooked, but are definitely worth your attention.
Apache Libcloud
What it's for: To access multiple cloud providers through a single and stable API.
Why it's great: With support for both Python 2.x and 3.x, APIs are available for DNS, compute, storage, and load balancing. PyPy is also supported, for those using the PyPy version of Python for added performance. Apache Libcloud has a single mechanism for orchestrating dozens of providers and the associated methods for manipulating their resources, which is a boon for cloud providers.
NumPy
What it's for: Scientific computing and mathematical tasks, including linear algebra, financial operations, statistics, and many more.
Why it's great: NumPy is an extension to Python that adds support for large, multidimensional arrays and graphs, along with a large library of high-level mathematical functions. NumPy incorporates features of the competing Numarray into arithmetic, with extensive modifications. NumPy is open source and has many contributors. It's one of the simplest, most flexible ways to add support for multidimensional arrays to Python.
Pillow
What it's for: Image editing
Why it's great: Pillow aims to be easier to use than PIL (Python Imaging Library) and yet compatible with PIL with minimal changes. Extensions are included for both native Windows imaging functions and the Tcl/Tk Tkinter GUI package supported by Python. Pillow is available via GitHub or PyPI.
Pygame
What it's for: A set of cross-platform Python modules for creating video games.
Why it's great: Pygame includes computer graphics and audio libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language. It provides a useful way to work with many GUI-oriented behaviors: dealing with multi-channel audio, designing canvas and sprite graphics, handling windows, collision detection, and so on.
Scrapy
What it is for: Screen data collection and Web crawling.
Why it's great: Scrapy can be used to extract data using APIs or as a general-purpose web crawler. It not only keeps the whole process simple but also creates a class that describes the type of element you want to collect and writes some rules on how to extract the data from the page. The results are exported as JSON, XML, CSV, or any other numeric format. Additionally, Scrapy can be extended to allow for many other behaviors, such as managing cookies or handling logging on a website.
