After reading this chapter, you should have a solid understanding of the wonderful background that Nmap brings to the information security world. Starting as a small project, the Nmap project is now one of the pillars of several industries.

If you have followed the installation instructions, you should now have a fully functional copy of Nmap ready to work with throughout the rest of the chapters. If not, now would be a great time to go ahead and install the tool so that you are ready to start scanning, auditing, and assessing!

In the next chapter, we will learn the basics of TCP/IP networking in order to better understand how Nmap is able to assess open ports, and find out which services and operating systems are running.