In this chapter, we introduced NSE and its amazing capabilities. By now, you should have installed the latest version of Nmap and have your development environment ready to go. The Nmap options covered in this chapter will be all you need to comfortably run and debug NSE scripts. Pay close attention to the different script rules (prerule, postrule, portrule, and hostrule) that will be shown throughout the book.

Now we are ready to start writing NSE scripts and get familiar with all the available libraries. In the following chapters, you will discover the true power of NSE. The next chapter covers the fundamentals of Lua programming, so prepare yourself to learn this amazing scripting language.