Python for Secret Agents: Analyze, encrypt, and uncover intelligence data using Python, the essential tool for all aspiring secret agents

Steven F. Lott

€18.99 per month

4 (9 Ratings)

Paperback Aug 2014 216 pages 1st Edition

Steven F. Lott

€18.99 per month

4 (9 Ratings)

Paperback Aug 2014 216 pages 1st Edition

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If you are a Python beginner who is looking to learn the language through interesting projects, this book is for you. A basic knowledge of programming and statistics is beneficial to get the most out of the book.

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cracker Mar 01, 2015

A fun take on learning Python of tying all the lessons to the needs of spy. This gives a real good idea of what programming can do and an introduction to common programming problems. Many beginner books tend to focus heavily on syntax without a theme to tie it all together.

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A. Zubarev Oct 10, 2014

This book is about learning Python, but in such a way you will be hardly able to put the book aside. So do not be fooled by the title. Yes, you will learn about modules, classes and even unit tests!And even though Python for Secret Agents is seemingly aimed at beginner programmers it should be pure fun for the rest of us. In my view this book constitutes serious work covering such important and frequently used techniques as accessing remote data, getting files over FTP, RESTAPIs, JSON(including serialization), ZIP archives, Geospatial calculations or simply teaching such common techniques as file path processing, numerical computations, lists and dictionaries or Unit Testing. And clever statistical data processing, too. NumPy, SciPy libraries are covered which is a great plus.I was able to extract a ton of useful approaches to dealing with web data – BeatifulSoup is among the ones. The book became more and more exiting as I progressed through it until that all unfolded into one aha moment and finally exploded in a-la Cirque De Soleil kind of finale - last chapter: “A Spymaster’s More SensitiveAnalyses”.A great, great rare read I did not experience for a long time. Thank you Steven F. Lott! I am looking forward to reading more books from you.For the sake of this review and by means to downgrade my mark if I had to mention a few deficiencies that would be the lack of sample output (I just not always had the time for running each code example), nor does it provide examples on how to work with shape data (geolocations), but the Shapes is old school.So all in all it is worth your buck.Five out of five!

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izartxo Aug 18, 2015

Divertido a la hora de aprender conceptos diferentes sobre python. Se lee muy rápido y para un usuario medio se comprende perfectamente

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Zippy Oct 23, 2014

With a title like “Python for Secret Agents,” one might think that F. Steven Lott’s latest instructive effort in the Python world would be geared toward the kind of Alan Turing-like eccentric geniuses who decoded secret German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II.In reality, the secret agent theme is a clever conceit to both help teach the Python programming language and explain how to work with a number of useful add-on libraries, such as PILLOW and Beautiful Soup. (Don’t get me wrong, there ARE some actual secret agent-like code examples, such as embedding a secret message in an image and a simple, inefficient password cracker to open an encrypted zip file – not exactly Edward Snowden-level material that will keep the NSA biting its collective fingernails in the middle of the night, but interesting and informative nonetheless.)Lott has written this book in such a way that the fundamental ideas in one chapter are leveraged and assembled into a subsequent chapter, and then those and other elements get combined into larger projects in still later chapters. Thus, it is recommended that you read the chapters in sequence, from beginning to end.Lott covers a surprising amount of material, from installing Python to using Internet protocols and data-interchange formats (FTP, JSON, etc.) and Representational State Transfer (REST), to dealing with Bitcoin and its brethren cryptocurrencies, parsing and file compression/decompression, to steganography (the general science of hiding information) and converting geographic coordinates into addresses and vice versa.(Whereas the goal of cryptography is to make data unreadable by a third party, steganography simply hides the data from a third party, such as embedding a message in an image or other innocuous file.)There’s even a chapter on “A Spymaster’s More Sensitive Analyses,” which elucidates data analysis (comparisons, correlations, statistics) in conjunction with an explanation of generator expressions and classes of objects.Finally, the concept of modules, how to build them and how to construct a test and self-testing module is presented.Steven Lott has produced an amusing and enjoyable Python tour for a type of programmer unfamiliar with Python who is poised just between total “clueless” beginner and intermediate in terms of general programming knowledge and experience.

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Daniel Lee Oct 02, 2014

If you're looking for a fun, quick read that will show you some neat tricks for mashing up and manipulating data in Python, this is the right book for you. Python for Secret Agents has a wide variety of fun tricks. It's got nice code examples that help you get to know many Pythonic best practices, and although it doesn't descend below the language's surface, it does give you glimpses of several builtin or freely available packages for solving problems across the board.The book is clearly intended for beginners, and it's written so that it won't lose you if you read it. However, in keeping with the Pythonic philosophy, it tends to implement things only if they're needed or if implementing them allows the author to show something useful to his audience. This has the positive effect that readers above the intermediate level can enjoy the book because they're introduced to libraries that they might not have worked with before.That's not because the author works with exotic packages, but rather because he covers such a broad range of topics. I especially appreciated how the author always connected disparate sections that could have been written on their own. As it is, stringing them together brought them a lot closer to real-life projects.For example, the author shows some simple text parsing tricks, followed by file compression and decompression. He then strings the whole thing together in a dictionary-based, very basic brute force password cracker that can decrypt a poorly encrypted zip file. Along the way, the author gently pounds the best practice into your head of always working with context managers when you have resources that need to be closed again.This knowledge of context managers is brought into the next chapter, where you use them while downloading data from the Internet. The reader is then shown how to encode REST queries and parse XML in order to pull information straight out of different sources in the Internet. A short excursion into Python collection types helps the user to be ready to serialize and deserialize the data they find.This knowledge is then applied again in a nice demonstration of some simple steganography, followed by a more complex mash-up of the content from the previous chapters, where the user serializes and deserializes geographic coordinates and uses them to look up objects with a REST API. The author shows an example of how to efficiently process the acquired objects using generators, connecting disparate data sources into a meaningful application tailored to the project's needs.The book was a lot of fun to read, and although it is not challenging, it provides a broad focus without sacrificing clarity or clearness. Beginners that start here will have the luck of being indoctrinated with generator expressions, context managers, simple unit tests, docstrings and exception handling, and they'll learn the simplest beginnings of object orientation too.I can thoroughly recommend the book to any beginner wanting to look into Python, and it's worth thumbing through the table of contents if you're past that level just to see if there are any examples that might be of interest to you. I'll probably never pick it up again, but it was a fun read with some nice tricks I'll be sure to remember.

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Python for Secret Agents: Analyze, encrypt, and uncover intelligence data using Python, the essential tool for all aspiring secret agents

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