Basic things required for hacking

As far as i know many of them think hacking to be fun or else just to show their friends how good they are at networks...or else cracking friends passwords or email ids can be even remote systems in the network...ok let it be any case i would discuss some of the few basic necessities.

So basically everyone would look for the tools or the set of steps that are involved in this.
But let me make u clear nothing is possible without any practise...

First of all the operating system itself has many tools in it.like command prompt in XP.
DOS prompt or command prompt has many commands that help in moving further.

ex. Telnet
netstat
tracert

along with this some tools like nmap,cain &abel ,whois are the most used.