Top 15 Python Packages You Must Try

Python’s extensive ecosystem offers thousands of third‑party libraries, and this article highlights fifteen of the most useful packages, describing their functionality and key characteristics.

1. Dash

Dash is a relatively new package ideal for building data‑visualization apps entirely in Python, combining Flask, Plotly.js, and React.js.

2. Pygame

Pygame is a Python wrapper for the SDL multimedia library, providing low‑level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, gamepads, and graphics hardware based on OpenGL and Direct3D.

Audio

Keyboard

Mouse

Gamepad

OpenGL/Direct3D graphics

Pygame is highly portable and can also play MP3 files directly from Python scripts.

3. Pillow

Pillow specializes in image processing, allowing creation of thumbnails, format conversion, rotation, filtering, and batch operations on many images.

Below is a code example that loads and renders an image:

4. Colorama

Colorama enables colored terminal output, making Python scripts more readable and fun.

5. JmesPath

JMESPath simplifies extracting elements from JSON documents in Python, providing a clear query language for JSON data.

6. Requests

Requests builds on urllib3 to make HTTP requests simple, powerful, and versatile.

Example code demonstrates how easy it is to use Requests.

Requests supports authentication, cookies, POST/PUT/DELETE, custom certificates, sessions, and proxies.

Authentication

Cookies

POST/PUT/DELETE

Custom certificates

Sessions

Proxies

7. Simplejson

Simplejson is a fast, C‑accelerated JSON library that offers broader Python version support and more frequent updates than the built‑in json module.

8. Emoji

The Emoji library is useful for analyzing media data that includes emoticons.

Below is a simple code example.

9. Chardet

Chardet detects the character encoding of files or data streams, useful when the encoding is unknown.

10. Python-dateutil

Python‑dateutil extends the standard datetime module with powerful features such as relative deltas, recurrence rules, and comprehensive timezone handling.

11. Progress and tqdm

Both packages simplify creating progress bars; tqdm is newer and offers additional features.

12. IPython

IPython provides an enhanced interactive shell with features like object introspection, persistent history, rich tab completion, magic commands, and support for parallel and distributed computing.

13. Homeassistant

Home Assistant is a Python‑based home‑automation platform that integrates lights, blinds, energy monitoring, device tracking, entertainment systems, and more, offering easy network discovery and open‑source flexibility.

14. Flask

Flask is a lightweight micro‑framework for building quick web services or simple sites, with over 700 extensions available.

15. BeautifulSoup

Beautiful Soup parses HTML and XML, providing easy navigation, searching, and modification of parse trees, and works with parsers like lxml and html5lib.

Automatic Unicode handling

Integration with popular parsers

Powerful tree traversal and searching

Original source: Medium article