[Book Review] Violent Python

This is a book review for Violent Python: A Cookbook for Hackers, Forensic Analysts, Penetration Testers, and Security Engineers.

I had a lot of fun reading the book, this book is full of ideas that you can expand on. Midway thru the book, I used an example in the book to solve a problem that I was facing at work. It illustrated the power of Python, the precise readability coupled with LOTS of third-party libraries makes Python the language of choice for the author and may others for doing the type of security work that they do.

It is a nice collection of existing tools (os, sys, re), along with some popular libraries (pexpect, beautiful soup, scapy, dpkt), as well as some specific purpose built libraries (PyBluez). Finding the right libraries can really be the difference of weeks vs. days of development cycle. Using them in the right combination too.

The book, of course, can be used for both good and evil. This is in part why unlike some of the other book reviews, I am not posting some of the example code I have written. It just feels kind of personal, but to be sure the examples work, some needs minor tweaking to fit your needs. It is also nice that the book provides a VM that came pre-packaged with a lot of the tools pre-installed. In short, "Solving complex problem with minimal code", as the author stated. I would highly recommend this book.