Introducing Python, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Modules and Packages

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This will be the 12th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Information about the package is as important as the package itself.

Frederick W. Smith

During your bottom-up climb, you’ve progressed from built-in data types to constructing ever-larger data and code structures. In this chapter, you finally learn how to write realistic whole programs in Python. You’ll write your own modules and learn how to use others from Python’s standard library and other sources.

The text of this book is organized in a hierarchy: words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Otherwise, it would be unreadable pretty quickly¹. Code has a roughly similar bottom-up organization: data types are like words; expressions and statements are like sentences; functions are like paragraphs; and modules are like chapters. To continue the analogy, when I say that something is explained in Chapter 8 in this book, in programming that’s like referring to code in another module.

Modules and ...