Part IV - Tips, Tricks and TutorialsΒΆ

In Part IV, you will learn how to install 3rd party packages from the Python Package Index (PyPI). You will learn a bit about easy_install, pip and setup.py and how to use these tools to install the packages. This is just the first chapter though. Here’s a listing of the packages you will learn about:

  • configobj - working with Config files in a more “Pythonic” way.
  • lxml - a package for working with XML
  • pylint / pyflakes - Python code analyzers
  • requests - a Python-friendly version of urllib
  • SQLAlchemy - an Object Relational Mapper for Python
  • virtualenv - learn about virtual environments in Python

The reason we will be looking at configobj is because I think it works better than ConfigParser, the module that comes with Python. The configobj package has an interface that is just more intuitive and powerful than ConfigParser. In the next chapter, we’ll look at the lxml module and learn a couple of new ways to read, parse and create XML. In the fourth chapter, we will look at pylint and pyflakes, which are great for code analysis. They can look at your module and check for errors. pylint can also be used to help you get your code to conform to PEP8, the Python style guide.

The requests package is great replacement for the urllib module. Its interface is simpler and the documentation is quite good. SQLAlchemy is the premier Object Relational Mapper for Python. It allows you to write SQL queries, tables, etc in Python code. One of its best features is that if you need to switch database backends, you won’t have to change your code very much to continue working with said database. For the last chapter, we’ll look at virtualenv, a neat module that allows you to create mini-virtual environments that you can write your code in. These virtual environments are especially handy for testing out new modules or just new releases of modules before you apply them to your Python core installation.