Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my family — my beautiful wife, Clare, and my five children, Emily, Carter,
Cohen, Brady, and Mason — for all of the encouragement and tolerance while I spent a year and a
half of my life writing this book. My brothers, sister, Mom, Dad, and Paulette have also given me a
lot of motivation to keep pushing through no matter what. I love you all.
To all my folks at Immunity (I would list each of you here if I had the room): thanks for tolerating me
on a day-to-day basis. You are truly an amazing crew to work with. To the team at No Starch — Tyler,
Bill, Serena, and Leigh — thanks so much for all of the hard work you put into this book and the rest
in your collection. We all appreciate it.
I would also like to thank my technical reviewers, Dan Frisch and Cliff Janzen. These guys typed out
and critiqued every single line of code, wrote supporting code, made edits, and provided absolutely
amazing support throughout the whole process. Anyone who is writing an infosec book should really
get these guys on board; they were amazing and then some.
For the rest of you ruffians that share drinks, laughs and GChats: thanks for letting me piss and moan
to you about writing this book.
Chapter 1. Setting Up Your Python
Environment
This is the least fun — but nevertheless critical — part of the book, where we walk through setting up
an environment in which to write and test Python. We are going to do a crash course in setting up a
Kali Linux virtual machine (VM) and installing a nice IDE so that you have everything you need to
develop code. By the end of this chapter, you should be ready to tackle the exercises and code
examples in the remainder of the book.
Before you get started, go ahead and download and install VMWare Player.
[
1
]
I also recommend that
you have some Windows VMs at the ready as well, including Windows XP and Windows 7,
preferably 32-bit in both cases.
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