Today, the Python programming language is one of the most popular. When we write Python code for Production-Level Data Science Projects, our code grows in size, and as a result, most likely, it gets messy over time. In other words, if you keep your code in the same file as it grows, this makes it more difficult to keep and debug.
Python modules, which use files and directories to organize and categorize content, are an excellent solution to these kinds of problems.
What are Python Modules?
A module is essentially a code library. A file holding a set of functions that you intend to include in your program.
In Python, Modules are files that have the “.py” extension, but that contains Python code that you can import into your Python Program to do something or perform a function.
It is easy to think of a module as a code library or a file that has a set of functions that you want to use in your app.
With modules, we can put together functions, classes, or any other code block in the same file. This way, we can keep them all together. So, when writing big Python code blocks for production-level projects in Data Science, it’s a good idea to break the big Python code blocks into modules with up to 300–400 lines of code each.
The module has the following parts:
- Defined and implementable classes,
- Variables, and
- Functions that you can use in another program.
Let’s see if we can get a better grasp of the subject by using an example:
Let’s say we want to create a calculator application. In our application, we want to do a few things, like add, subtract, multiply, divide, and so on.
So now, what we’re going to do is break up the code into smaller parts. We can either make one module for all of these operations or separate modules for each of the operations. Then we can use these modules in our main program logic, like when we write code.
Here, the main goal is to cut down on the amount of code. If we make modules, that doesn’t mean we can only use them for this program. We can also use these modules in other programs.
Just like functions, there are modules that come with Python, and others are available online that we can use in our code anytime.
Now that we know what modules are, let’s try to figure out how to make and use a module in Python in the next tutorials. We’ll also look at some other things that Modules can do too.
