The Big Book Of Raspberry PI

Introduction

I have recently signed up to be a member of Amazon Prime and this means I can pick and choose from a huge range of titles which are instantly transferred to my Kindle. The Amazon Prime service costs £49 a year and is a bargain. (Just over £4 a month). A lot of the titles within the lending library are from up and coming authors and self-published authors.

Over the next few months I will be adding a new feature to Everyday Linux User where I will pick a technical book at random, read it and review it.

Today I am reviewing “The Big Book Of Raspberry PI” by Miss Alison Watson.

The Review

The main difference I find between published and self-published work is the choice of content within the book. A published author will have had their work scrutinised by the publishing house and they will have been told what to include and what to leave out.

Self-published authors tend not to have that advantage and will often throw in the proverbial kitchen sink. The “Big Book Of Raspberry PI” falls into this category.

There are a number of chapters which explains what the Raspberry PI is, how to download operating systems, how to set up the SD card and how to set up the Raspberry PI. These are very useful chapters and written well. You can of course get the same information about the Raspberry PI on this site.

The book gives a basic run down of everything you need to do to install Raspbian (although it is called Debian in the book). The subject is covered fairly well and if you are new to the Raspberry PI this is useful information.

Having set up the Raspberry PI there are various other important set up options covered including connecting to the internet and how to use the Raspberry PI configuration utility.

So now you have the Raspberry PI up and running the book then shows you how to set up Apache, PHP and MySQL and also shows how toinstall Wordpress. This is a nice little project if you wish to go down this route.

The book then jumps suddenly back to the beginning and begins explaining how to install Fedora onto the Raspberry PI. There is then a guide showing how to install the LAMP stack on Fedora.

The “big book of Raspberry PI” has basically shown you how to install 2 different operating systems on the Raspberry PI and how to turn them into web servers.

The next chapter shows you how to install RiscOS on the Raspberry PI and once that chapter is complete you are shown how to install RaspBMC.

The RaspBMC chapter is actually very useful and includes information about setting up Spotify and how to connect to RaspBMC from other devices.

At this point a lot of information has been covered in the “Big Book Of Raspberry PI” but the best is definitely saved until last.

There is a fairly comprehensive guide to Python and a step by step tutorial showing how to create games using PyGame. The book goes into a good level of detail with screenshots and code and covers the whole process very well. The majority of the book is actually a tutorial about Python and PyGame.

Summary

Most of the information in the book can be obtained by searching the internet and many of the sections are covered on this website.

The “Big Book Of Raspberry PI” is available in paperback and as a Kindle eBook. 

If you are new to the Raspberry PI then the book will come in very handy and it is reasonably priced.

In the UK the paperback costs £5.83 and the Kindle eBook £2.99. In the US the book costs $10.18 in paperback and $4.98 as a Kindle eBook.