Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By : Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By: Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

Digital forensics plays an integral role in solving complex cybercrimes and helping organizations make sense of cybersecurity incidents. This second edition of Learning Python for Forensics illustrates how Python can be used to support these digital investigations and permits the examiner to automate the parsing of forensic artifacts to spend more time examining actionable data. The second edition of Learning Python for Forensics will illustrate how to develop Python scripts using an iterative design. Further, it demonstrates how to leverage the various built-in and community-sourced forensics scripts and libraries available for Python today. This book will help strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. By the end of this book, you will build a collection of Python scripts capable of investigating an array of forensic artifacts and master the skills of extracting metadata and parsing complex data structures into actionable reports. Most importantly, you will have developed a foundation upon which to build as you continue to learn Python and enhance your efficacy as an investigator.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

This chapter has covered a wide range of introductory content that provides a foundation to be built upon throughout the duration of this book; by the end, you will become well-versed in Python development. These topics have been handpicked as the most important items to comprise a basic understanding of the language as we move forward. We have covered data types, what they are and when they are used, variable naming and the associated rules and guidelines, logic and operations to manipulate and make decisions based on values, and conditions and loops that provide a sequential organization for our scripts and form the baseline of everything we develop. The code for this project can be downloaded from GitHub or Packt, as described in the Preface.

Please consider re-reading this chapter and working through the examples multiple times to help with comprehension. Just like anything else, learning a new language requires a lot of practice.

Through these features alone, we can create basic scripts. Python is a very powerful and complex language belying its simplistic syntax. In the next chapter, we will explore more complex foundational items and continue expanding upon knowledge established in this chapter, prior to moving on to real-world examples.