[Tutor] Finding libraries

[Oliver Maunder]

Hi all

I'm pretty new to Python - I've worked through Dive Into Python, but not
done a lot else. One thing I have realised is that pretty much whatever you
want to do in Python, someone else has already done it and stuck it in a
library. My question is, how do you find these libraries.

Here's an example - I want to write a program that downloads large files
from a website and stores them in a specified directory - preferably with
some kind of progress indicator. I'm pretty sure I can do this with urllib,
sgmllib (or just regular expressions to extract the links), basic python
file handling, and maybe some threading so I can download more than one file
at a time. Should be straightforward, but I don't want to do it only to find
there's a module with a get_file_from_web(url, destination,
progress_callback) function in it.

So, what ways are there to find out which modules are out there (other than
reading this list, which I'm already doing)? Also, does anyone have specific
suggestions for the program I'm working on?

Thanks for your help

Olly
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