Who this book is for

This book is for field agents who know a little bit of Python and are very comfortable installing new software. Agents must be ready, willing, and able to write some new and clever programs in Python. An agent who has never done any programming before may find some of this a bit advanced; a beginner's tutorial in the basics of Python may be helpful as preparation.

We'll expect that an agent using this book is comfortable with simple mathematics. This involves some basic statistics and elementary geometry.

We expect that secret agents using this book will be doing their own investigations as well. The book's examples are designed to get the agent started down the road to develop interesting and useful applications. Each agent will have to explore further afield on their own.