Chapter 1. New Missions – New Tools

The espionage job is to gather and analyze data. This requires us to use computers and software tools.

However, a secret agent's job is not limited to collecting data. It involves processing, filtering, and summarizing data, and also involves confirming the data and assuring that it contains meaningful and actionable information.

Any aspiring agent would do well to study the history of the World War II English secret agent, code-named Garbo. This is an inspiring and informative story of how secret agents operated in war time.

We're going to look at a variety of complex missions, all of which will involve Python 3 to collect, analyze, summarize, and present data. Due to our previous successes, we've been asked to expand our role in a number of ways.

HQ's briefings are going to help agents make some technology upgrades. We're going to locate and download new tools for new missions that we're going to be tackling. While we're always told that a good agent doesn't speculate, the most likely reason for new tools is a new kind of mission and dealing with new kinds of data or new sources. The details will be provided in the official briefings.

Field agents are going to be encouraged to branch out into new modes of data acquisition. Internet of Things leads to a number of interesting sources of data. HQ has identified some sources that will push the field agents in new directions. We'll be asked to push the edge of the envelope.

We'll look at the following topics:

• Tool upgrades, in general. Then, we'll upgrade Python to the latest stable version. We'll also upgrade the pip utility so that we can download more tools.
• Reviewing the Python language. This will only be a quick summary.
• Our first real mission will be an upgrade to the Beautiful Soup package. This will help us in gathering information from HTML pages.
• After upgrading Beautiful Soup, we'll use this package to gather live data from a web site.
• We'll do a sequence of installations in order to prepare our toolkit for later missions.
• In order to build our own gadgets, we'll have to install the Arduino IDE.

This will give us the tools for a number of data gathering and analytical missions.