What you need for this book

A secret agent needs a computer that they have administrative privileges over. We'll be installing additional software. Without the administrative password, they may have trouble installing Python 3, Pillow, or BeautifulSoup.

For agents using Windows, the packages we're looking at adding come prebuilt.

For agents using Linux, the developer tools are required. Linux has a complete suite of developer tools that are common. The Gnu C Compiler (GCC) is the backbone of these tools.

For agents using Mac OS X, the developer tool, Xcode (https://developer.apple.com/xcode/), is required. We'll also need to install a tool called homebrew (http://brew.sh) to help us add the Linux packages to Mac OS X.

Python 3 is available from the Python download page at https://www.python.org/download.

We'll download and install several things besides Python 3.3:

• The setuptools package, which includes easy_install-3.3, will help us add packages. It can be downloaded from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools.
• The PIP package will also help us install additional packages. Some experienced field agents prefer PIP over setuptools. It can be downloaded from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip/1.5.6.
• The Pillow package will allow us to work with image files. It can be downloaded from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.4.0.
• The BeautifulSoup Version 4 package will allow us to work with HTML web pages. It can be downloaded from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4/4.3.2.

From this, we'll see how extensible Python is. Almost anything an agent might need may already be written and available through the Python Package Index (PyPi), which can be downloaded from https://pypi.python.org/pypi.