Programming doesn't have to be monotonous, nor does it have to be hard. I don't enjoy programming most of the time, except for when I'm working on a project that I personally enjoy. It can be hard for people who experience the same feelings to even get started with programming, which is why I'd personally recommend starting by having fun first and building up the basics at the same time. I've picked out eight Python libraries that might enable you to do exactly that, and they're all easy and fun to use.

If you want to get started, I've created a GitHub repository with sample code for all of these libraries that will get you set up with the basics. You can expand on them or do anything you want with them, as they're merely a first step to understanding what each library does. You'll need to make sure you have Python installed to use these.

8 Pillow

Pillow, a successor to PIL (which was known as the Python Imaging Library), is like Photoshop for programmers... kind of. It's a great library that can do some very basic image editing extremely easily. It can create images from scratch with just a few lines of code, or it can do more advanced things.

For example, you could write a program that automates cropping and resizing your images to a certain aspect ratio or resolution. You can also apply filters to images programmatically, and make other changes, too. It's a library that can go pretty in-depth, and it's worth getting to grips with if you want to modify images in batches.

You can also make your own GIMP plugins with Python!

7 Pywhatkit

Pywhatkit is a lot of fun, as it can do a lot. It can send WhatsApp messages, search Google, search YouTube, or even draw ASCII art from a supplied image file. It's very versatile, and you can pair all of these features together to create a bot that can make Google searches for you and send those results into a WhatsApp chat, for example. Plus, the ASCII art can just be fun, so there's a lot of potential here.

Even for message scheduling, something that WhatsApp doesn't natively support, Pywhatkit can be useful. There are third-party applications you can use (if you trust them) to schedule WhatsApp messages, but Pywhatkit works through your web browser. Write a message, set the time, start the script, and it'll handle everything for you when the time comes.

6 Faker

Do you ever need fake data for projects? Things like names, addresses, or emails? Faker is a great Python library that can generate all of that for you, so if you need to create a database of fake information it can do it incredibly quickly.

Of course, there are limited uses for something like this, but it's very easy to use, and it can be fun to generate random lists of information with ease. It might even be good for other programming projects that you're working on, so Faker earns its place on this list just for that.

5 Pyttsx3

Do you need text-to-speech for anything? Pyttsx3 is an incredibly simple library to use that can convert text to speech for you and read it out. For accessibility reasons or even building your own assistant, it's an incredibly powerful text-to-speech engine that runs very quickly.

Text-to-speech can be niche at times, but there's a reason that it exists. It can turn your programs into partially voice-operated or remote-operated programs, and you can use it for updates. Imagine pairing it with a weather notifier, where it can read out a weather forecast for you on a set interval? Things like that are genuinely useful.

4 MoviePy

Like with Pillow, there are Python libraries for editing videos, too. These can do basic edits like cuts, concatenations, title insertions, video compositing (non-linear editing), video processing, and creation of custom effects. If you want to make basic edits to a lot of files at once or have a script to make the same edits to multiple videos, then MoviePy can be a great way to do it.

Of course, this library can also pair well with existing programs that you may have created, assuming that you work with video files. It's got great documentation and even better compatibility though, so it'll work with pretty much any file on pretty much any machine.

3 PlaySound

This is also really basic, but the PlaySound library can, well, play sounds. Like we mentioned about notification systems, you could easily write a script that simply plays a sound to notify you. For more advanced projects, like data processing, it can be useful to add a PlaySound option so that you know when it completes.

There are other reasons you might want to play with this library, as audio can be incredibly important. Notifications are a big use case, but it can also be useful to add a little bit of flair to whatever application you might be working on. Don't neglect audio!

2 Turtle

Turtle is a very, very fun Python library that's also incredibly simplistic. It's basically a little robot with a pen that moves across your screen in whatever way you've programmed it, and it can draw on a canvas in doing so. You create the turtle at a spawn point of 0,0 by default, give it a command to move, and it will draw in whatever direction you give it.

Turtle is great for helping people learn programming concepts and visualize what happens when they change the parameters they give it. It was originally created as an educational tool, but it's also fun to play around with and can have uses for advanced projects at times, depending on what you want to do.

1 Textblob

You've probably heard of sentiment analysis, as it's how a lot of online tools automate content filters. Essentially, sentiment analysis tries to understand whether a piece of text is offensive, or tries to understand what the emotion is behind the text. Textblob is a Python library that's super easy to use and can tell you whether a piece of text is positive or negative, and subjectivity will tell you whether or not there's an emotional element or personal opinion.

For quick projects and analyzing text, Textblob can be fun to play around with and see how it identifies messages!