Installing third-party packages

One of the strongest capabilities of Python is the ability to use an impressive catalog of third-party packages that cover an amazing amount of ground in different areas, from modules specialized in performing numerical operations, machine learning, and network communications, to command-line convenience tools, database access, image processing, and much more!

Most of them are available on the official Python Package Index (https://pypi.org/), which has more than 130,000 packages ready to use. In this book, we'll install some of them, and in general spending a little time researching external tools when trying to solve a problem is time well spent. It's very likely that someone else has created a tool that solves all, or at least part, of the problem.

As important as finding and installing a package is keeping track of which packages are being used. This greatly helps with replicability, meaning the ability to start the whole environment from scratch in any situation.