Is Python for Beginners? Who uses it & why you should learn it.

if your youtube feed looks anything like mine it's probably filled with suggestions on python right now and that's what we're gonna talk about do you actually need to know python and i'm gonna break it down really simple for everybody so you will know if you really need to know python or not so to keep this simple for us i basically asked out on twitter and linkedin what is your job title and how do you utilize python in that role and i created a spreadsheet with some of these results that we got i will link to these threads for twitter and linkedin in the description below so you guys can go and check those out if you would like but let's go over this spreadsheet because the data here is really phenomenal and i say data very specifically for a reason so in this handy-dandy spreadsheet that i have created here we have the job role and then we have how python was used so i'm not going to go over each and every one of these but i will provide a link to a google sheets for this so you can look at this directly if you would like but there are some that i would definitely like to highlight because as i was going over this i wasn't exactly that surprised i would say i i kind of knew this was coming but just the response that we got we only had 49 responses from this but what it can tell us or what it really did tell us from the spreadsheet is that everybody who utilizes python is utilizing it for some type of automation or and or i should say data and that's honestly from my experience and my knowledge with python in every way that i have seen python being utilized so i know a lot of people come to the it career questions youtube channel trying to get advice about what they need to learn going forward in their careers maybe you're just getting started out and some people are telling you hey you should probably learn python but does it actually make sense for you to learn python and i ask you that because if you take a look at these job roles it basically lays out whether you need to utilize python or not there are two more entry level roles on this job list that answered this question and one of those is from terminals and coffee on twitter thank you for answering this question i appreciate you just wanted to give you a shout out they're in desktop support they don't utilize python but they use powershell so that's definitely something to take note of and i definitely can see that and you're if you're in some type of desktop support or help desk position you may often utilize powershell a lot more than python with the other person who's in the help desk just says they don't use it and this third person who says that they're an i.t lead technician they say they use it to automate everything possible whatever that means now going through this list there's a few things that we can learn if we look at some of the cyber security positions you're going to see that they utilize python to help automate some of the tasks that they're doing some of the network engineers also utilize python to do the same thing but as you're going to see going through the spreadsheet some network engineers are just learning python to help them automate the things but overall what we're going to gather and what we're going to learn ultimately from this spreadsheet is that python is heavily used to help you automate tasks that you're already doing and to help you gather data and also take that data and do other things with it so python is really there to help you to automate the things and make your life easier but do you absolutely need to know python right now no absolutely not what you can do from taking a look at the spreadsheet is look at these different roles are those the types of positions or types of job titles that you are looking to achieve if they are then yes you definitely should be taking a look at python if they are telling you that they're utilizing it in their position these are real world people out there telling you how they use python in their specific job role so again are those job roles what you're looking for if it is then definitely take a look at learning more python and ultimately what you can think about is there any way that i can utilize python to automate the things in my job or is there a way that you can utilize python to help you gather data and more information about things that you're doing in your position or things that you're doing in your organization there was one instance where i saw somebody working in help desk was utilizing python to pull an api from their help desk ticketing system so that they can grab the tickets that were coming in first before anybody else could and i thought that was a phenomenal way to utilize python in an entry level position they thought outside of the box and how they could utilize python to automate something for them and use that for their advantage and i think that's just a fantastic way that you can just think about ways to utilize python because honestly there are a ton of different ways that you can use python to do things for you as you saw from that spreadsheet so again it's not going to be needed in every single it role that's out there and it's not something that you're going to need to know all the time it's something that i never really had to learn but i had an interest in learning and i can tell you from personal experience the best way to learn any programming language is to understand first what you want to create with that programming language meaning what is it that you actually want to build with it what is it that you actually want to do with it if you can figure that out then it can make that learning process of learning programming maybe a little bit more enjoyable and again from my first hand experience writing a python script it was definitely pretty difficult to do but i would say out of all the different programming languages i've ever tried to learn in the last 20 plus years python has probably been the easiest one for me to pick up on and understand but i also had a project that i was really passionate about learning and understanding more about and this is a scraping script that i built in python that goes out and searches jobs out on indeed and it comes back and delivers information about those jobs i do still want to create a video on this so if there's anybody out there who still watches this channel who's going to give me a hard time about that i'm just doing this to point that out i still really do want to make a video on that it's yeah getting that script to actually work and deliver the data the information that i wanted it to was phenomenal now i could have went out in indeed.com and done a job search for each and every job description that i was looking for and i could have thrown that in an excel sheet manually but python let me automate that entire process where i just simply wrote the script out and hit start and it automated that process and went out and indeed it searched for every single job description for every single state and it listed how many jobs were in that state for that specific position that was like the coolest thing that i've ever done and it was thanks to python that i was able to do that so maybe at this point you're considering whether you should learn python or not and if you are i would strongly suggest heading over to the cyber mentor youtube channel where he has an entire python video that walks you through the fundamentals of python i have it listed here on the screen as you can see it's about three hours long but it really helps you lay out the fundamentals of learning python and i think it can be very beneficial to you and if you like his teaching style you'll definitely enjoy this video as well you're probably wondering about a project now this isn't exactly a project that you're going to start from start to finish but heath put out a video just recently about stealing wi-fi passwords and you can do this with python i think that video can provide a ton of value in just showing you firsthand how powerful python can actually be all right so if you're that person who's like i'm never going to use python i hate programming i never want to touch it see it don't even talk to me about python i'm actually going to tell you why you should learn python or more specifically why you should at least understand the fundamentals of python so why it would be very beneficial for you to just check out that free video from heath adams just so you can understand the fundamentals of python not telling you that you need to become an expert in python or that you need to write your own scripts by any means but any it professional should at least have some type of understanding of like python fundamentals or other scripting fundamentals bash powershell even the command prompt those basic fundamentals will always help you throughout your career and i'm gonna tell you why right now now i'm gonna tell you again firsthand from my experience i hate programming i just i cannot handle it it's not something that my brain can process it just does not compute okay it's not my jam but i can take a look at many different scripts and have a good fundamental understanding of what it does and that's why i feel like every it professional should at least have fundamental understanding of scripting languages powershell python bash it's a great thing to at least know okay now i can take a look at this script right here this is the script from heath adams last video like we talked about the links in the description below when you go to that video it's going to take you to the github where you can get the script so i didn't write this script heath wrote this script or i should say heath had help writing the script which you'll hear about in that video but i know that i can take a look at this just by knowing the fundamentals of python and how i can have a basic understanding of what it's going to do now again keep in mind i am not a python expert i'm just going to go over this at a very basic fundamental level so that anybody watching this video can understand because that's what's most important here if you want to correct me in the comments by all means feel free to do so and i strongly encourage you to do that so from the basic understanding that i have of python i could take a look at the script kind of understand what it's going to do and that alone is very important and i'm going to tell you why and that's why we're coming to you like this and the big face because anytime you come across a random script in your environment in the environment that you're working in and you're like that doesn't look right i've never seen that before what you can do is open it up you can open up in a text editor your text editor of choice right and you could take a look through the code in that script whether it's a batch file whether it's a powershell file a python file you open it up in your your text editor and you can start reading through it and just by having a basic fundamental knowledge of these scripting languages you should be able to get an idea of what that script is going to be doing so i know taking a look at this first line of code where it says import subprocess os cis that's basically going out to the python library and pulling on like pre-existing code it or more or less it's helping you kind of further automate your process in building your python script so like sub process and os with python importing those specific modules if you will again probably not the proper name for that correct me below you guys are good at that it's just kind of helping you automate the process a little bit easier that's the best way to put it if you go through the course with heath he'll explain this a little bit better but i know in my head exactly what this is doing i'm not going to be able to maybe explain it to you the best because i wouldn't teach python but i know what this is doing so i know in my head if this python script is importing things i could go out in google and say what does import subprocess do or what does import os do in python and it's going to tell me right so i know that if there's anything else in that import field i can go out and google and see what it's trying to import is that a good thing is it a bad thing i don't know but we can definitely go out on google and find out what it is that it's trying to import to help with this script building process so going further through this video i don't want to kind of complicate things any further for you but i know looking at this url it's giving a defined url parameter so that's interesting all right so that's this url that's being used it's going to be called somewhere else within the script meaning somewhere else in the script it's going to refer back to that url and it's just going to say url and what python is going to say well url equals this https webhook site right that's my basic understanding of python again i can go through this script and look at these things and have some kind of understanding of what's going on i'm going to skip this payload part because i'm going to let heath explain that so going to this next part here this command underscore output it says this equals subprocess well we know in the import there we imported the subprocess so what's this going to do well it's going to run netsh well now if you know what net sh does we can start taking a look at this a little bit further and try to build upon like in our head what it's going to be doing so it says wlan export profile clear all right and then capture output equals true all right so this next part print command output so what that is going to do what i know about python and i haven't even watched this video yet haven't even gone through the script like officially never even ran this script yet i know that it's going to print this output here so print command output it's actually going to print out this process it's going to automate the process of running that sh it's going to grab the wlan information which is your wireless lan information and it's going to grab information about that profile and export it so we know based on this video of we're going to steal your wi-fi credentials this is part of that process and helping us steal those credentials our python script is going to automate this process for us so if somebody ran this script right if you ran the script on your computer right now it is going to pull off your wi-fi credentials so you're going to be able to see what your wi-fi password is through running this script that's basically boiling down the rest of the script what is going to happen but i'm going to let heath walk you through this entire process because he's going to do a much better job of it the point of me touching and highlighting a few of these things here was hey i'm not a python expert i could never write this script off the top of my head i would have to google this for days but i know just from understanding the fundamentals of python i can look at this and know what it's going to do and it's not because well that video title told us what it's going to do it's ultimately because i kind of understand what these things mean and that's really my overall point of why everybody should kind of learn python again it's not to be an expert it's just because at some point in your career you might run across a python script out there in the wild and it's in your environment and you have no idea what it does and that's not a good thing you should definitely take a look at that and try to understand what it does because it could be a very bad thing just summing up this entire video i just wanted you to figure out how you could understand whether you actually need to learn python or not in most cases you don't really need to learn python but in all cases learning python is going to be very very helpful for you i hope you found this video useful if you like it you know what to do all that youtube stuff that those youtubers love to say about liking subscribing supporting the channel and all that crazy wild stuff you could do that if you'd like but you don't have to thank you for watching and as always take it easy

Channel: IT Career Questions

Views: 8,093

Keywords: IT Career Questions, cyber security, it careers, technology, information technology, it professional, python, learn python, do you need to learn python, should you learn python, python for it professionals, learn python right now, network chuck, the cyber mentor, tcm, python for beginners, python for hacking, hacking python, wifi hacking with python, python for ethical hackers, learning python programming

Id: m_y5g1SHbTA

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022