So today’s talking is about learning the basics, or (for some experienced players in this field) to improve your skills in this field of automation. Now without wasting anytime let’s get started.
Introduction
Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language, released in 1991. Python’s design philosophy emphasizes on code readability with its use of significant whitespace. Its language approach the aim to help programmers write clear, logical code for small and large-scale projects. Also, python is an object oriented programming language.
What’s in it for us?
Well, it is one of the essential skills you should master, as if you’re stuck with something or a long way to manually try out your daily tasks… then guys, python is here to help you out to automate your these tasks, within a few lines of code. I mean, I can’t emphasize enough on the need to have skills with this language. CTF players, a lot of penetration tester, and bug hunters, depends on python scripts to automate there tasks, they are going to perform.
How to get started?
Well if you’re beginner in any the field of programming, you need to start from scratch. In case, if you are familiar with some languages like C, but new to python, you may need to consider doing a course on python from platforms like — coursera, udemy, udacity etc. Now what if you’re a pro, or already familiar with the basics. Try doing and advanced python course, deep dive into python libraries, try to automate your daily tasks, play CTFs, try out challenges on cryptopals. Just don’t sit back, because python is a MUST.
The History
Python earlier was really vast, and there were no hopes for python to grow, then came Python 2.0. It was released on October 16, 2000, with many major new features, including a cycle-detecting garbage collector (in addition to reference counting) for memory management and support for Unicode. However, the most important change was to the development process itself, with a shift to a more transparent and community-backed process.
After the a good reach of Python 2.0. It was found there were problems with some of its implementation(will discuss that later). Then came Python 3.0, a major, backwards-incompatible release, was released on December 3, 2008 after a long period of testing. Many of its major features have also been backported to the backwards-compatible, while by now unsupported, Python 2.6 and 2.7. There were not any major changes in python 3.0, but some notable are listed below:
- Changing to print from print() so that it is a built-in function, not a statement. This made it easier to change a module to use a different print function, as well as making the syntax more regular.
- Removal of the Python 2 input() function, and the renaming of the raw_input() function to input().
There were a few others, but that’s not the motive of this article. My aim was to let you guys learn the importance and a bit about python before starting your journey, into learning python, automating your daily tasks/challenges, and coding your own exploits. Also, let me know if you want more such articles, I will be happy to upload them.
