Top 10 Python Modules 2022

Key Takeaways

hi everyone welcome to this video where i'll be going through the top 10 python modules that i think you should learn or at least know about in 2022. this list is going to be unranked so the ordering doesn't really mean anything but the goal for me with this list is to try to cover as wide range of a field as possible all the way from machine learning to web development and as a result of that i won't include two modules from the same category if they are too similar because i want to limit this list to just 10 items which i feel is already a lot to have on your plate i'm also focused on larger modules and frameworks which will help you deliver a complete project from end to end so this list won't include modules like numpy or pi test which although they are very good and very important packages in themselves uh they usually i feel they play more of a supporting role in a project so with that out of the way let's get started the first module is fast api this is a framework for building python web apis this means turning your python functions into a restful http endpoint apis like these are extensively used across all type of tech stacks whether it's web development enterprise software machine learning finance or game development to use fast api all you have to do is write your function then annotate it with a decorator now when you run this python program you can use an http endpoint to call a function and if you want to publish it for production use you can either deploy to a server using pretty much any cloud provider or you can even host it as a serverless function like on aws lambda the next framework on this list is django now if you need a web framework that can do more than fast api then django is the heavyweight option it pretty much offers an entire tech stack rolled into one framework allowing you to build a production grade web application from start to finish competitors in other languages include frameworks like ruby on rails or laravel and like those other examples it's a traditional back-end web framework in that the actual html pages are generated and transmitted to the user from the server side this unfortunately also means that django does require a server to run so unlike with fast api there is no serverless way to architect a django project which consequently means it's harder to scale horizontally it's also not as widely adopted or dominant as some other web frameworks in different languages such as react or asp.net but despite all of these setbacks django is still an excellent choice for python users its key strength being in that it allows you to develop an end-to-end product very quickly just from this one framework alone well-known platforms that were built on django or at least at some point in their history include instagram spotify and youtube number three is tensorflow as a runtime python dominates the machine learning and ai space and there are many high quality frameworks within this category but the most popular one is tensorflow which is developed and maintained by google other notable frameworks include keras and pytorch which is my personal favorite but from what i understand these frameworks all tend to have similar capabilities in that they give you tools and functions to one build a neural network model two feed it with data this process is usually called training or fitting and three use the trained model on new input or also known as inference the frameworks themselves aren't difficult to use the functions and modules are pretty straightforward the real barrier in machine learning however is actually understanding all the concepts and math behind your neural network so knowing what things like layers features and activation functions are and how to apply them applications of tensorflow include things like google translate text-to-speech generation and ai for self-driving cars the fourth module on this list is pandas if you want to do anything with data you won't get far without running to pandas this module gives you an extremely powerful set of tools to work with tabular data like csvs and spreadsheets or time series data like weather records or financial market data you can use it to visualize the data do bulk operations on it modify rows and columns and much more pandas is used extensively in any data-heavy field like machine learning statistics finance and enterprise software number five matplotlib if you want to visualize data on a graph then matplotlib is currently the most popular solution you can turn your data think lists dictionaries or matrices into line graphs bar charts heat maps and pretty much anything else you can think of what i really especially like about matpot lib is that it is super easy to pick up you can probably generate your first graph in less than 10 minutes but underneath the surface it packs a ton of functionality for how you can visualize and present your data this module is also extremely popular in any data heavy field including machine learning and ai where it is commonly used to visualize a neural network's training progress number six pillow python imaging library also known as pillow or pil is a framework that lets you work with images so that means loading images creating images modifying color channels saving images that kind of thing if images are a core component of your project then pillow is a great module to learn for example you can use it to pre-process image data for machine learning use it as an api to generate thumbnails from text input or automate tasks like resizing and cropping images uploaded to your application number seven is opencv opencv is the dominant module for computer vision in python as you can probably guess that's what the letters cv stand for like pillow it is a module designed around working with images but unlike pillow which focuses on image manipulation and editing opencv focuses on understanding the meaning of an image unsurprisingly its applications are closely related to machine learning for example things like face detection object tracking and image classification number eight is pygame pygame is a game development framework with a graphical user interface and although it's not really powerful enough to make commercial games it is still an excellent framework for prototyping and for learning there's actually not a lot of python frameworks that let you render an interactive real-time graphical interface so pygame stands out to me because it lets you work with a lot of those type of concepts without having to go as far as learning something like unity or unreal engine number nine is pi qt pi qt is also a graphical user interface framework its focus though is in building cross-platform desktop applications the library gives you widgets and tools to construct an entire ui with things like buttons lists text boxes and so on and since it is cross-platform you can expect your application to work on linux windows and mac os notable examples of pi qt applications include spyder which is a python ide and early iterations of dropbox and last but not least number 10 is selenium selenium is a web automation tool or a web driver it is a virtual browser that you can use to interact with regular websites for example filling in forms moving the mouse and clicking buttons and gathering data from the website the main use case for selenium is actually for writing automated tests for your front end but you can also use it to write bots or tools that automate the interaction with a real website and that's it for the top 10 python modules that i recommend you learning for building your next project in 2022. just in case you're interested some other modules i've considered for this list include flask beautiful soup kievy and ursina and a couple of others as well if you have experience with any of these frameworks or if there's other good frameworks you know that you think deserve to be on this list then please share your thoughts in the comments below otherwise that's pretty much it thank you for watching and hopefully i'll catch you in the next one [Music] you