Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By : Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By: Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

This book will illustrate how and why you should learn Python to strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. The tutorials use an interactive design, giving you experience of the development process so you gain a better understanding of what it means to be a forensic developer. Each chapter walks you through a forensic artifact and one or more methods to analyze the evidence. It also provides reasons why one method may be advantageous over another. We cover common digital forensics and incident response scenarios, with scripts that can be used to tackle case work in the field. Using built-in and community-sourced libraries, you will improve your problem solving skills with the addition of the Python scripting language. In addition, we provide resources for further exploration of each script so you can understand what further purposes Python can serve. With this knowledge, you can rapidly develop and deploy solutions to identify critical information and fine-tune your skill set as an examiner.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning Python for Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Try and except


The try and except syntax is used to catch and safely handle errors encountered during runtime. As a new developer, you'll become accustomed to people telling you that your scripts don't work. In Python, we use the try and except blocks to stop preventable errors from crashing our code. Please use the try and except blocks in moderation. Don't use them as if they were band-aids to plug up holes in a sinking ship—reconsider your original design instead and contemplate modifying the logic to better prevent errors.

We can try to run some line(s) of indented code and catch an exception or error with the except statement, such as TypeError or IndexError, and have our program executing other logic instead of crashing. Using these correctly will enhance the stability of our program. However, improper usage will not add any stability and can mask underlying issues in our code.

When an error is encountered, an error message is displayed to the user containing debug information and the...