Essential Libraries

Why Python's large standard library still leaves room for a vast PyPI ecosystem, and the mental model - boundaries, version contracts, lockfiles, supply chain - behind every library choice catalogued in this section.

Sync/async HTTP clients done right.

Beautiful terminal output and TUIs.

Typed configuration from env/files.

Retries, backoff, and resilience.

Better datetime ergonomics.

Image processing in Python.

Office docs and PDFs.

HTML/XML parsing and scraping.

Cross-links to the data layer.

Picking dependencies that age well.