Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is easy to learn and extensible programming language that allows any manner of secret agent to work with a variety of data. Agents from beginners to seasoned veterans will benefit from Python's simplicity and sophistication. The standard library provides numerous packages that move beyond simple beginner missions. The Python ecosystem of related packages and libraries supports deep information processing. This book will guide you through the process of upgrading your Python-based toolset for intelligence gathering, analysis, and communication. You'll explore the ways Python is used to analyze web logs to discover the trails of activities that can be found in web and database servers. We'll also look at how we can use Python to discover details of the social network by looking at the data available from social networking websites. Finally, you'll see how to extract history from PDF files, which opens up new sources of data, and you’ll learn about the ways you can gather data using an Arduino-based sensor device.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)
6
Index

Starting with the digital output pins


We'll use the digital output pins for our first mission. This will show us the basics of preparing a sketch—an Arduino program. We'll download it to an Arduino and watch it work.

The Arduino language is vaguely like Python, with some extraneous punctuation. The language is quite a bit simpler and is statically compiled into hardware-level instructions that are downloaded to the processor.

An Arduino sketch must define two functions: setup() and loop(). The setup() function will run just once when the board is reset. The loop() will be evaluated repeatedly—as often as possible—by the Arduino processor. The exact timing will vary depending on what additional tasks the processor has to engage in to manage memory and deal with the various devices. It's almost is if the Arduino has an overall piece of code that looks like this:

main() {
   setup();
   while(true) { loop(); }
}

We don't need to actually write code like this; our sketch is written as if this processing...