I'm an analyst but do some engineering. We had a project to discover any "legacy" aka outdated SSL or TLS in our server environment. I used Python to enumerate IPs, run nmap against those found live, and output an excel sheet giving me a list of all IPS found that were running it as well as port and version numbers. I could not imagine tackling this any other way. In other words, Python is very, very useful and versatile. More on reddit.com

A must? No. There's a variety of career paths in the professional domain of cybersecurity that do little-to-no coding. Some don't even read code. However, your professional opportunities and flexibility expand considerably the more open you are to learning and adopting the technologies around you. Python in particular is handy because... It's both a programming language and a scripting language It's compiled to bytecode and (as a script) interpreted at runtime (vs. involving an intermediate compiler/linker), which helps abstract away a lot of overhead when getting to learning programming in general. It's an object-oriented programming (OOP) language, which makes it structurally similar to many other modern programming languages (i.e. Java, C, etc.), if not syntactically dissimilar. It's extensible with the vast number of libraries you can import; this lowers the overhead of learning the language even more. As a high-level language, it's more human-readable than lower-level languages (e.g. C), which makes adoption/learning more easy. Versions of it are shipped by default in many different Linux distributions. More on reddit.com

Learn how to use the requests, json, and datetime modules to start working with APIs. There are others but you can get away with a lot using those. Learning how to automate tasks using the APIs of your various tools will pay off immensely. More on reddit.com

Short answer: yes Long answer: it is interesting to know at least 1 programming language. It is useful to automate boring tasks (bruteforcing is one example), Understand how the code is evaluated (why does adding a `X OR 1=1` in the input field of a login page of a web-app w/ a SQL DB changes the behavior of the code - SQL injection) Get the logic behind what it takes to build a (web/mobile/...) application. The main point IMO is to learn at least one language, while Python is the greatest language ever been made and is blessed by multiple gods you can still (if you have bad tastes) start with other (lesser) languages. I won't get into the whole my language is better than your's debate bc it would be childish but Ruby, Javascript, C++ or any other languages is a great start too :) Hope it helps :) More on reddit.com