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

Learning the basics of python is a good start. In cyber security python would mostly be just one of many tools where you dont need to know all the details of the language (compared to application development). You may even stop before going into object orientation. After that it really depends on what you want to go into: networking/ web operating systems reverse engineering/ binary exploitation crypto to name a few. I think it does not even matter if you begin. You could as well just start with one of these areas and learn python as you go along. More on reddit.com

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 We had a project to discover any "legacy" aka outdated SSL or TLS in our server environment.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