What you need for this book

A field agent needs a computer over which they have administrative privileges. We'll be installing additional software. A secret agent without the administrative password may have trouble installing Python 3 or any of the additional packages that we'll be using.

For agents using Windows, most of the packages will come prebuilt using the .EXE installers.

For agents using Linux, developer's tools are required. The complete suite of developer's tools is generally needed. The Gnu C Compiler (GCC) is the backbone of these tools.

For agents using Mac OS X, the developer's tool, XCode, is required and can be found at https://developer.apple.com/xcode/. We'll also need to install a tool called homebrew (http://brew.sh) to help us add Linux packages to Mac OS X.

Python 3 is available from the Python download page at https://www.python.org/download.

We'll download and install several things beyond Python 3.4 itself:

• The Pillow package will allow us to work with image files: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.4.0
• The Beautiful Soup version 4 package will allow us to work with HTML web pages: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4/4.3.2
• The Twitter API package will let us search the social network: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/TwitterAPI/2.3.3
• We'll use PDF Miner 3k to extract meaningful data from PDF files: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfminer3k/1.3.0
• We'll use the Arduino IDE. This comes from https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software. We'll also want to install PySerial: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyserial/2.7
• This should demonstrate how extensible Python is. Almost anything an agent might need is already be written and available through the Python Package Index (PyPi) at https://pypi.python.org/pypi.