Summary

In this chapter, we saw the basics of our espionage toolkit: Python and our text editor of choice. We've worked with Python to manipulate numbers, strings, and files. We saw a number of Python statements: assignment, while, for, if, elif, break, and def. We saw how an expression (such as print("hello world")) can be used as a Python statement.

We also looked at the Python API for processing a ZIP file. We saw how Python works with popular file-archive formats. We even saw how to use a simple corpus of words to recover a simple password.

Now that we have the basics, we're ready for more advanced missions. The next thing we've got to do is start using the World Wide Web (WWW) to gather information and carry it back to our computer.