29.5 Software

This book's task was to present the Python language, including brief overviews of some of the most important modules and libraries that come with Python. There are countless other such supporting software packages available, most of them for free, on the Internet. In this section, we give you pointers as to what this landscape of software looks like, what maps are available to help you find what you're looking for, and finally some notable software packages that can make choosing Python such a high-value choice.

One of Python's weaknesses has been the lack of a single, authoritative repository for such third-party software. While there are volunteers working hard to solve that problem, the best we can do at time of writing is to point you to the several alternative methods that can be used to find out what's available and where.

29.5.1 Search the Web

It used to be hard to find things on the Internet. Some of us remember days before the Web, when word of mouth and secret handshakes seemed to be required to find particular pieces of software. These days, search engines like Google do 95% of the hard work. Regardless of the topic, searches on Google are very likely to get you what you want.

29.5.2 Search the Mailing List Archives

Software that's available on the Web has typically been announced in public, or at the very least discussed in public. You can search the various mailing lists mentioned above with specialized search engines, such as Google's Groups interface (although that doesn't cover all of the Python mailing lists, only those mirrored as newsgroups), http://python.org/search, or the mailing list archives at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN.

29.5.3 Look in the Vaults of Parnassus

"The Vaults of Parnassus" is a fairly old (in Internet years) and well-established directory of Python software. It uses a library-style directory of Python software and Python-related tools. The vaults are at: http://py.vaults.ca/. Note that the vaults archive only metadata finding something on the vaults is no guarantee that the pages it refers you to are still around, or that the information on the vaults are necessarily up to date.

29.5.4 Check the Python Package Index (PyPI)

A new project which, unlike some of its predecessors, seems likely to succeed is called PyPI (Python Package Index). Hosted at http://www.python.org/pypi, the current prototype lets people register their python package either manually, or, preferably, using the package description software distutils, which is part of the standard library. As of this writing there are only a few dozen packages listed, but by the time you read this the catalog is likely to be much larger.

29.5.5 Look in the Python Cookbook

The Python Cookbook is a joint project combining the efforts of ActiveState, O'Reilly and Associates, and the Python community. ActiveState hosts a web site (aspn.ActiveState.com/Python/Cookbook), which lets anyone post their favorite recipe of Python code, and solicit feedback from readers of the site. O'Reilly published a book from selected, edited, and expanded recipes called the Python Cookbook, coedited by Alex Martelli and David Ascher. The book contains hundreds of well-motivated recipes explained in detail, and has become a favorite even of long-time Python programmers. The online site contains hundreds more recipes, and is constantly being updated. Both are excellent resources for that smallest kind of software package, the snippets and idioms that define the fluent speaker of a language.