Book review: Raspberry Pi Essentials

Title: Raspberry Pi Essentials
Author: Jack Creasey
Publisher: PACKT Publishing
Publishing date: April 2015
Subtitle: Leverage the power of programming to use the Raspberry Pi to create awesome games

Link: https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/raspberry-pi-projects-kids-second-edition


Review

“Raspberry Essentials” aims to illustrate the basics of Raspberry Pi, from installation to advanced use. The book is meant for both experienced DIY and first time amateurs.

In the first part of the book, it wouldn’t have hurt to include more details for first time users.

As an example, at page 14:

“Ctrl + Alt + Backspace: Use this key combination to log out of the current Xsession user (use Xsession to login).

Ctrl + Alt + F1: Use this key combination to switch to a command session on tty1 (type exit to close)

Ctrl + Alt + F7: Use this key combination to switch back to the graphical desktop

Ctrl + Alt + F2 through F6: Use this key combination to switch to a command session on tty2-tty6.”

The passage above works for an experienced user -- meaning someone who knows developer tools and has a basic knowledge of administrative tasks of a Linux OS -- but I’m afraid that a first time user who has never seen a Linux OS wouldn’t understand what is a Xsession, an tty1, tty2 and so on!

If you are a Linux guy, this book will prove to be very useful, thanks to plenty of tips and hands-on tutorial that will help you to achieve various tasks, from network configuration to appropriate monitor customization. In addition to that, readers will learn, step by step, to keep the development environment up to date.

Some complex tasks and configuration files can be downloaded from a web site.

Unfortunately some bash scripts (or python scripts) are presented in their final form, without a good explanation about all their functions. This way, programmers can use them as a “recipe” or should put in a lot of work on their own to try to fully understand them.

Chapter 5, "Port Input and Output on the Raspberry Pi", and Chapter 6, "Driving I2C Peripherals on the Raspberry Pi", are much more useful and well developed but, in my opinion, the scripts could have used a deeper explanation; it would have tremendously improved the whole presentation.

Chapter 7, "Going Mobile with Raspberry Pi", and 8, "Creating a Raspberry Pi Line-following Robot", are great reading materials for DIY aficionados. They pick up some ideas from previous chapters (like using a camera) and they add great advice for someone who needs only a few tips to achieve his goals. Maybe this is the real target of the book: a DIY fan with a lot of time to try something new and an outstanding ability to learn in autonomy.

I would have liked the book more if the author had developed the topics in a way that could have been easier to understand. Maybe the author could have focused on less topics. I would recommend to revise the book paying more attention to every single subject from the beginning to end.

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Book review: Raspberry Pi Projects for Kids - Second Edition

Title: Raspberry Pi Projects for Kids - Second Edition
Author: Daniel Bates
Publisher: PACKT Publishing
Publishing date: April 2015
Subtitle: Leverage the power of programming to use the Raspberry Pi to create awesome games

Link: https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/raspberry-pi-projects-kids-second-edition


Review

The first chapter of the book follows a tradition of other Pack books about Raspberry Pi and describes the system and how to set it up.
In the second chapter, the author introduces the main programming language featured in the book: Scratch.
This chapter represents a good introduction to the language and to program a simple animation, while the next one goes deeper on the language, using another game as an example.
The fourth chapter deals with Python. I must admit that, in my opinion, this chapter aims to cover too many subjects at once. It might prove to be difficult for the reader to absorbe all the information provided.
But if the reader manages to keep up with everything, there are a lot of useful examples and all the main features of Python are discussed.
In the fifth chapter, the user is guided through creating a game that is programmed in Python, and the author shows how to create a simple game controller, building it from scratch.
After this, there’s a chapter that focuses on using Google Maps inside a Python program and teaches how to personalize a program adding buttons and other widgets to it.
The last chapter focuses on how to play notes and songs using Sonic Pi. Readers will understand how to do it via simple commands, writing a program that acts as a complete composer.
The entire book is full of really interesting examples, but I am under the impression that it shows the readers the pros and cons of different technologies without going deeper in any of them. A little more that 120 pages can’t be enough to discuss all the fascinating topics mentioned in the book. 
The book doesn’t seem to be suitable for kids, but it would be a good choice for parents who want to learn to program captivating games, maybe to share them with their children. 
In this way, it can be wonderful choice, but if you want to continue to program games, you are bound to need further reading, at least about Scratch and Python.

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