Python is a very versatile language, thanks to its huge set of libraries which makes it functional for many kinds of operations. Its versatile nature makes it a favorite among new as well as old developers. As we have reached the year 2024 Python language continues to evolve with new libraries and updates getting added to it which enhance its capabilities.

The developers must be familiar with at least the most popular libraries. In this article, we will look at some of the Python libraries that every developer should explore at least once.

What is A Library?

In a programming language context, a library refers to the collection of pre-written code modules that serve a specific functionality. These modules are reusable, these are integrated into the programmer’s code which increases the development process and functionality of the software. It is an encapsulation of common tasks or complex sets of algorithms that provide a set of functions that a developer can use to his advantage without having to create software from scratch. These are repositories of code that promote code reuse, modularization, and collaboration with the programming community. Popular languages such as Java, Python, and JavaScript have many libraries that cover diverse domains making software development easier.

What Are Python Libraries?

Python libraries are reusable code modules that contain pre-written code. You can integrate it into your code to save time and effort. They cover many diverse domains, such as NumPy, which stands out for numerical computation and can very easily perform operations on large arrays and matrices. Pandas, another trendy library, is widely used for data manipulation and analysis and contains efficient data structures like DataFrames. These and many more libraries collectively contribute to Python’s popularity by making the development process easier and promoting a collaborative ecosystem.

Top 20 Python Libraries

Since we have a basic understanding of what libraries and Python libraries are it is the right time for us to head straight to learning the most common and widely used libraries in Python

1. NumPy

NumPy is the short name for Numerical Python, which is a Python library predominantly used for technical and scientific computing. Its array-oriented computing capabilities make it an essential tool for fields such as linear algebra, statistical analysis, and machine learning.

Key Features:

• numpy.ndarray is a data structure, a multidimensional array that allows the storage and manipulation of numerical data
• NumPy contains many functions that allow operations to be performed element-wise on arrays.
• NumPy supports linear algebra such as matrix multiplication, eigenvalue decomposition, and solving linear equations.

2. Pandas

Pandas is an open-source data manipulation library for Python. It is built on top of the NumPy library. It introduces two primary data structures Series and DataFrame. Series is a one-dimensional labelled data whereas DataFrame is a two-dimensional labelled data resuming a table.

Key Features:

• Pandas has DataFrame and Series, data structures for handling two-dimensional tabular data and one-dimensional arrays.
• Pandas offers special tools for working with time series data.
• Pandas have tools for handling missing data, duplication, and other cleaning tasks.

3. Matplotlib

Matplotlib is a data visualization library that allows developers to create static animated and interactive animations in Python. The graphs and plots it produces are extensively used for data visualization.

Key Features:

• It supports line plots, bar charts, scatter plots, and more.
• Object Hierarchy: It follows a hierarchical structure where the top-level container is called a Figure and individual plots or charts are contained within Axes.
• The pyplot module provides a simple interface for creating plots. The plot function is used for creating line plots while other functions like scatter(), bar(), and hist() are used for different visualization.

4. TensorFlow

It is an open-source Python library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is particularly used for training and inference of deep neural networks.

Key Features:

• It is based on data flow graphs where nodes represent mathematical operations and edges represent tensors.
• It is a machine-learning library developed by Google.
• It helps in the creation of computational graphs and execution on various hardware platforms.

5. PyTorch

PyTorch is an open-source library designed for tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing (NLP).

Key Features:

• PyTorch makes use of n-dimension arrays known as tensors to represent data.
• PyTorch performs operations on tensors and represents them on a dynamic computational graph.
• PyTorch is efficient in the training of neural networks as it can efficiently calculate the derivative of tensors.

6. Scikit-learn

Scikit-learn is a machine-learning library that provides tools for data mining and analysis. It includes lots of machine learning algorithms for different tasks.

Key Features:

• It has a consistent API which makes it easier to learn and use. The uniformity of the API across different algorithms helps in switching between models.
• It offers various algorithms for classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction.
• It can easily integrate with Python libraries such as Pandas and NumPy making it easy to work with different data formats.

7. Requests

The request library allows you to send HTTP requests extremely easily. It is widely used for interacting with the web APIs.

Key Features:

• The request supports various HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
• Request can handle sessions and persistent cookies which makes it easy to maintain state across multiple requests.
• The request is essential for web scraping and other related tasks.

8. Keras

Keras is a high-level neural network API that is used for building artificial neural networks. It is modular and helps us to construct neural network models layer by layer.

Key Features:

• It provides a user-friendly interface that simplifies the complex process of creating and training neural networks.
• With its integration into Tensorflow, it inherits the strengths of Tensorflow.
• Keras supports the building of RNN and CNN catering to a wide range of ML tasks.

9. Seaborn

Seaborn is a data visualization library which is based on Matplotlib. It is very helpful in creating beautiful statistical plots with minimal code.

Key Features:

• Seaborn has many high-level functions that simplify the process of creating complex statistical visualization.
• The themes and color palettes built-in chances the visual appeal of the plots.
• It works perfectly with Pandas DataFrames, it takes DataFrames as input making it easier for users working with tabular data.

10. Plotly

Plotly is a Python library helpful in the creation of interactive and visually appealing plots and charts for your data.

Key Features:

• Plotly can work smoothly with popular libraries such as pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn.
• Plotly can create interactive charts and graphs that bring data to life.
• Plotly allows various chart types such as line charts, bar charts, and scatter plots to showcase your data.

11. NLTK

Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a library for working with human language. It provides an easy-to-use interface.

Key Features:

• NLTK is used for text processing, it has various tools for tokenization, stemming, etc.
• NLTK implements various natural language processing algorithms and techniques.
• NLTK easily integrates with other Python libraries such as sci-kit-learn and Matplolib etc which enhances its functionality.

12. Beautiful Soupthe

It is used for parsing the XML and HTML documents. It can be used to extract data from the web pages.

Key Features:

• Beautiful Soup can automate tasks related to HTML and XML documents.
• It can parse HTML and XML documents.
• It is open-source and easy to use.

13. Pygame

Pygame is a Python library that is used for developing video games or multimedia applications.

Key Features:

• Pygame contains computer graphics and sound libraries that can be used with Python.
• We can very easily create 2D games, simulations, and multimedia programs.
• You can work with PyGame on various OS such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.

14. Gensim

Gensim stands for Generate Similar is an open-source Python library for natural language processing (NLP). It processes raw digital texts using unsupervised machine-learning algorithms.

Key Features:

• Gensim can easily be plugged into your input data stream.
• Gensim can easily handle large text collections.
• Gensim can measure the similarity between documents using techniques like cosine similarity.

15. spaCy

spaCy is a Python library that is predominantly used for natural language processing (NLP). It is very fast, efficient, and production-ready hence suitable for many NLP tasks.

Key Features:

• It is written in programming languages Python and Cython.
• spaCy is very efficient in tokenization (the process of breaking a text into smaller units called tokens).
• spaCy can assign grammatical tags to each word in a text.

16. SciPy

SciPy is a Python library used for scientific and technical computing. It is built on top of NumPy so it has additional functionalities for various scientific computing tasks.

Key Features:

• SciPy can very easily approximate definite integrals. It has functions for numerical integrations.
• SciPy offers optimization that minimizes or maximizes a given objective function.
• SciPy has many functions for linear algebraic operations such as solving linear systems etc.

17. Theano

Theano is an open-source numerical computational library for Python. Using it the developers can easily evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays.

Key Features:

• It is designed for numerical computation involving large-scale mathematical operations.
• Theano can take advantage of the computational power of GPUs for faster computations.
• It can exchange data with other libraries such as NumPy because it can easily integrate with them.

18. PyBrain

PyBrain is a library in Python that is developed to provide tools for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural network research.

Key Features:

• PyBrain is modular that is user can easily, meaning users can easily create and combine different components to build custom machine-learning models.
• PyBrain supports both supervised and unsupervised tasks.
• PyBrain provides a range of neural network architectures such as feed-forward neural networks, recurrent neural networks, etc.

19. Bokeh

Bokeh is a Python library for data visualization. It offers a high degree of customization on the visualizations.

Key Features:

• The plots created in Bokeh are interactive and can be zoom-in-out, and scrolled allowing users to explore data dynamically.
• The interactive visualizations can be embedded in web applications or displayed in browsers.
• Bokeh supports many plots and chart types making it suitable for diverse data visualization.

20. Hebel

Hebel is a deep-learning library for GPUs developed. It accelerates deep learning computation using GPU acceleration.

Key Features:

• Hebel can harness the power of GPU to fasten deep learning computations.
• Hebel is built on top of NumPy so it can easily integrate with NumPy arrays and is compatible with other Python scientific tools.
• Hebel provides functionality for building, training, and deploying deep neural networks.

Conclusion

The top 20 libraries discussed in the article cover a wide range of applications from numerical computing, and data manipulation to machine learning, natural language processing and data visualization. These libraries simplify the development tasks and also promote a collaborative ecosystem that promotes code reusability. Whether you are working on scientific computing, data analysis, machine learning, web scraping or game development, these libraries are going to be used in them therefore as a Python developer you should explore them. Python libraries help developers build robust software, making Python a favorite among developers.

FAQs

What is a library in the context of programming languages?

In the context of a programming language library is a collection of pre-written code for some specific functionality. These modules are integrated into a programmer’s code to enhance the development process and software functionality.

What are some popular Python libraries every developer should explore?

The top Python libraries include NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Requests, Keras, Seaborn, Plotly, NLTK, Beautiful Soup, Pygame, Gensim, spaCy, SciPy, Theano, PyBrain, Bokeh, and Hebel.

How does NumPy contribute to technical and scientific computing in Python?

Its array-oriented computing capabilities such as the numpy.ndarray data structure, making it essential for tasks such as linear algebra, statistical analysis, and machine learning.

What are the features of Pandas and how is it used for data manipulation in Python?

It introduces two primary data structures, Series and DataFrame, for handling one-dimensional labeled data and two-dimensional tabular data, respectively. Pandas also provide tools for working with time series data and handling missing data

How does Matplotlib help in data visualization?

It is a data visualization library that allows developers to create plots in Python. It supports various chart types such as line plots, bar charts, and scatter plots. It follows a hierarchical structure, the top-level container is called the Figure,and individual plots or charts are withing Axes.

What is TensorFlow and where is it used?

TensorFlow is an open-source library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is used for training and inference of deep neural networks.