Many Nmap scripts come with Nmap, and are already prepackaged on your system. Still, though, it can be difficult to determine which scripts you'd like to run for each particular scan—or assessment—that you may be on. Fortunately, the NSE documentation portal is one of the most in-depth and well-documented aspects of the entire Nmap project.
Note
By going to http://nmap.org/nsedoc/, you can see all of the scripts that are part of the official Nmap script repository.
The preceding screenshot shows the Nmap Scripting Engine Documentation (NSEDoc) reference portal web page, as well as all the official Nmap scripts at the time of writing this book. Each script has a small paragraph next to its name, which gives a brief description of what it is designed to do. At the time of writing, there are 490 and 113 Nmap scripts that are part of the official documentation—that's quite a lot you can do with the NSE!
These scripts are broken down into several categories, each with their...