Eh, some of the items in this list aren't so great.<p>simplejson is included in the standard library as json now. Yes, cjson is faster, but it's also more fragile and, well, less standardized. Everything but simplejson is effectively dead: simplejson won the json library wars.<p>html5lib is an odd choice for a new HTML parsing kit. lxml.html offers its own fast and good HTML parser, and can also use html5lib or BeautifulSoup as its backend while still producing an Element tree with plenty of convenience methods (like xpath). I am not sure why html5lib would be better here (maybe it's not as complicated, somehow?)<p>As for MySQLdb, that thing is awful. There are some replacements out there, and out of them my personal preference is for oursql. The creator/maintainer is a regular (an op, actually) on the #python IRC channel, so it's easy to get support, and it fixes a lot of the nasty quirks of MySQLdb.<p>His first four suggested libraries are definitely good, though<p><a href="http://docs.python.org/library/json.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/library/json.html</a>
<a href="http://simplejson.googlecode.com/svn/tags/simplejson-2.1.0/docs/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://simplejson.googlecode.com/svn/tags/simplejson-2.1.0/d...</a><p><a href="http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html" rel="nofollow">http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html</a>
<a href="http://codespeak.net/lxml/elementsoup.html" rel="nofollow">http://codespeak.net/lxml/elementsoup.html</a>
<a href="http://codespeak.net/lxml/html5parser.html" rel="nofollow">http://codespeak.net/lxml/html5parser.html</a><p><a href="https://launchpad.net/oursql" rel="nofollow">https://launchpad.net/oursql</a><p>EDIT: checked the date, the article is from 2008. I guess that explains things. :)