Libraries and Modules

Created By: Sean Boerhout

Nearly all programming language have libraries, or collections of code that perform a very specific task and are available to the public to use. For example, python's random library allows you to get random numbers, lists of numbers, and more, while faker allows you to get fake data about fake people, like a random name, address, email account, or country.

While those libraries may seem niche and somewhat useless, nearly all projects require a library for something since they can be so powerful. numpy, for example, is an extremely powerful in math-related functions. tensorflow does machine learning.

If you aren't using an ide that has a library built in, you may need to install it onto your computer with pip installer. Generally, libraries will give you the intructions to install them on their website

Importing and Basic use

Let's get started!

Libraries are essentially large collections of code, just like anything you'd write. With the import function, you can essentially copy-paste that code.

import random

Functions associated with a library must be shown to be linked to a library. For example, random has a method (a function made accessible by a class, which we'll learn more about later) which returns a random number between a given range called randint(). We can call it like this:

import random

random_number = random.randint(0, 9)

Notice that randint(0, 9) is prefixed by a random.. This denotes the fact that randint() is defined by the random library and not by you.

You might not always want to use the name of the library to prefix the method, however. To optimize this, you can use as:

import random as rdm

random_number = rdm.randint(0, 9)

That's about it with libraries!

If you want to konw the syntax of a function or what a function does, a quick google search for the documentation of the library would probably be the best course of action.