Tutorial: User (root/sudo free) installation of Python modules.
For this tutorial I will assume user installation of new packages by building from downloaded source, ie "python setup.py install." While this tutorial also applies to user installations with the easy_install command line tool, I reserve easy_install related notes to the "Gotcha's" section at the end of this tutorial.
This tutorial also assumes the reader is a user rather than a developer of python packages and ...