From the course: Python Standard Library Essential Training

Overview of the Python standard library - Python Tutorial

From the course: Python Standard Library Essential Training

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Overview of the Python standard library

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- [Narrator] Before diving into the course, let's take a look at the docs for the Python Standard Library, and get a feel for how it is organized, along with just how comprehensive it is. So here in my browser I have opened up the Standard Library's documentation home page, where you can see all of the individual modules listed. I'm looking at the documentation for the 3.7 version of Python, but when you watch this course the exact version number might have advanced a little bit. Don't worry about that, what's important is that this is for Python version 3, which is the modern version of the language, and is the version we will be using in this course. So, as I scroll through this page, you can see that there's a lot of content here. And again, these modules and functions come built in to the Python language distribution. When you use them in your Python app, then any other computer that has the same or higher compatible version of Python installed can also run your app. So there are modules and functions for, built-in data types, modules for processing text content, working with data types and numeric values in various ways. So here are some modules related to working with various kinds of file types. And as I scroll down, a little more, we can see some more specialized modules such as, cryptography, and working with information from the network, and the internet. So, I think you get the idea that the Standard Library is pretty comprehensive, and contains a lot of pre-built and tested code, that you could incorporate into your own apps. Now I'm not going to be able to cover every module in this course, because that would take a really long time. My main objective in this course is to cover some of the most useful and broadly applicable parts of the Library. And then you can feel free to experiment on you own, with some of the other modules. So, for example, let's go back to the top of the page here, and take a closer look at the section on text processing. When I click on that link I'm taken to a more detailed listing on the various modules contained within this section. So I'll just go ahead and click on the first link, which is the string module for working with various string operations. And that takes us to the detail documentation for this particular module, and as I scroll through it you can see there are examples for various constants, and modules, and functions contained within this module. That's how the documentation is organized. So I've organized this course into sections that cover some of the most common uses for the Library. But first we'll look at various ways of working with string and text information. Then, we'll investigate the features available for manipulating data, such as sorting, and efficient data types. Next we'll look at some common ways of working with files and directories, including .zip files and .csv files. Then it's on to working with numbers and mathematical functions. After that we'll learn about working with dates and times. And we'll finish up with modules that are used to access internet based information. As you go through the course, I would recommend that you open a separate browser window, and keep the documentation for the Standard Library loaded, so that way you can refer to it as necessary.

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