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.