the purpose of this isn' to add to your already overflowing list of potential library candidates insteadit provides you with list of ten libraries that work on every platform and provide basic services that just about everyone will need think of this as source for core group of libraries to use for your next coding adventure developing secure environment using pycrypto data security is an essential part of any programming effort the reason that applications are so valued is that they make it easy to manipulate and use data of all sorts howeverthe application must protect the data or the efforts to work with it are lost it' the data that is ultimately the valuable part of business -the application is simply tool part of protecting the data is to ensure that no one can steal it or use it in manner that the originator didn' intendwhich is where cryptographic libraries such as pycrypto (www dlitz net/software/pycrypto/come into play the main purpose of this library is to turn your data into something that others can' read while it sits in permanent storage the purposeful modification of data in this manner is called encryption howeverwhen you read the data into memorya decryption routine takes the mangled data and turns it back into its original form so that the application can manage it at the center of all this is the keywhich is used to encrypt and decrypt the data ensuring that the key remains safe is part of your application coding as well you can read the data because you have the keyno others can because they lack the key interacting with databases using sqlalchemy database is essentially an organized manner of storing repetitive or structured data on disk for examplecustomer records (individual entries in the databaseare repetitive because each customer has the same sort of information requirementssuch as nameaddressand telephone number the precise organization of the data determines the sort of database you're using some database products specialize in text organizationothers in tabular informationand still others in random bits of data (such as readings taken from scientific instrumentdatabases can use tree-like structure or flat-file configuration to store data you'll hear all sorts of odd terms when you start looking into database management system (dbmstechnology -most of which mean something only to database administrator (dbaand won' matter to you