Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

What can you do with the Raspberry Pi, a $35 computer the size of a credit card? All sorts of things! If you’re learning how to program, or looking to build new electronic projects, this hands-on guide will show you just how valuable this flexible little platform can be.

This book takes you step-by-step through many fun and educational possibilities. Take advantage of several preloaded programming languages. Use the Raspberry Pi with Arduino. Create Internet-connected projects. Play with multimedia. With Raspberry Pi, you can do all of this and more.

• Get acquainted with hardware features on the Pi’s board
• Learn enough Linux to move around the operating system
• Pick up the basics of Python and Scratch—and start programming
• Draw graphics, play sounds, and handle mouse events with the Pygame framework
• Use the Pi’s input and output pins to do some hardware hacking
• Discover how Arduino and the Raspberry Pi complement each other
• Integrate USB webcams and other peripherals into your projects
• Create your own Pi-based web server with Python

Matt Richardson is a Brooklyn-based creative technologist and video producer. He's a contributor to MAKE magazine and Makezine.com. Matt is also the owner of Awesome Button Studios, a technology consultancy. Highlights from his work include the Descriptive Camera, a camera which outputs a text description of a scene instead of a photo. He also created The Enough Already, a DIY celebrity-silencing device. Matt's work has garnered attention from The New York Times, Wired, New York Magazine and has also been featured at The Nevada Museum of Art and at the Santorini Bienniele. He is currently a Master's candidate at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Shawn Wallace is an editor at O'Reilly and lives in Providence, RI. He is also a member of the Fluxama artist collective responsible for new iOS musical instruments such as Noisemusick and Doctor Om. He designed open hardware kits at Modern Device and taught the Fab Academy at the Providence Fab Lab. For years he was the managing director of the AS220 art space and is a cofounder of the SMT Computing Society.