Can you recommend what Python library to use for accessing AMQP (RabbitMQ)? From my research pika seems to be the preferred one.
Pika is the RabbitMQ recommended library, and py-ampqlib is also mentioned. Depending on what you're using Rabbit for, you might also want to look at Celery (a client library dedicated to distributed queuing).
Again, depending on usage, you might also want to look at Apache's qpid which is a full AMPQ-based client-server alternative to RabbitMQ. One thing that attracted us to qpid was that it seemed to have better robustness on server crashes (queues are persisted in a distributed fashion).