7.1 Standard Library and Tooling Tour

Python’s standard library provides production-ready modules for common engineering tasks.

OS and filesystem

• os and shutil for paths, process interactions, and file operations
• glob for wildcard expansion

CLI and process behavior

• sys.argv for raw CLI arguments
• argparse for robust command-line interfaces
• sys.stderr and sys.exit() for error and termination behavior

Text, math, and data utilities

• re for regular expressions
• math, random, statistics for numeric work
• datetime for date/time operations

Compression and data exchange

• gzip, bz2, lzma, zipfile, tarfile
• json, csv, sqlite3

Testing and quality

• doctest for executable doc examples
• unittest for structured unit test suites

Official references

• Stdlib tour: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/stdlib.html
• Library index: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html
• argparse: https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html
• unittest: https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html