Education Ecosystem Blog

Every engineer worth his/her salt should have a set of awesome Python productivity tools. Livecoding.tv engineers are no exception. We would like to share one such set of tools, plugins, and libraries that Python streamers use on Livecoding.tv on a daily basis.

What is Python?

“Python is a programming language that is freely available and that makes solving a computer problem almost as easy as writing out one’s thoughts about the solution. It can be written once and run on almost any computer without needing to change the program,” (Python website). Python is the kind of language that adheres to new thinking in the programming world. It is thought to be easier than most to use and uses block structure and object orientation.

Python Productivity Tools, Plugins & Libraries

Here are the ten (10) best Python productivity tools, plugins, and libraries recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers:

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is one of the Python productivity tools (library) used for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It is designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping, and works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves Livecoding.tv engineers hours or days of work.

Pillow

Pillow is the friendly Python Image Library (PIL) fork, and comes highly recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers.

Gooey

Gooey converts your Console Applications into end-user-friendly GUI applications. It lets you focus on building robust, configurable programs in a familiar way, all without having to worry about how it will be presented to and interacted with by your average user.

Peewee

Peewee is a simple and small ORM. It has few (but expressive) concepts, making it easy to learn and intuitive to use.

Scrapy

Scrapy is an open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites in a fast and simple, yet extensible way.

Apache Libcloud

Apache Libcloud is a Python library for interacting with many of the popular cloud service providers using a unified API. It was created to make it easy for developers to build products that work between any of the services that it supports.

Pygame

Pygame is a set of Python modules designed for writing games. Pygame adds functionality on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the python language. Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system.

Pathlib

Pathlib is a path manipulation library for .Net. The goal of PathLib is to extend the feature set of System.IO.Path and bundle it all into a strongly typed path object.

NumPy

NumPy is the fundamental package needed for scientific computing with Python. It is derived from the old Numeric code base and can be used as a replacement for Numeric. It also adds the features introduced by numarray and can be used to replace numarray.

Sh

Sh (previously pbs) is a full-fledged subprocess interface for Python that allows you to call any program as if it were a function.

So there you have it: The ten (10) best Python productivity tools, plugins, and libraries to help you become more productive. What are your favorite Python productivity tools? What did we miss in this list that definitely needs to be added to make it complete?