The Raspberry Pi is a cheap,
basic, programmable credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a
keyboard. It can be used for many of the things that your PC does, like
spreadsheets, word-processing and playing games, but its real purpose is to
inspire children (and grown-ups) to learn how to program. Over five million
Raspberry Pis have been sold worldwide, so
far!

Raspberry Pi in easy steps
starts with the basic components you'll need, setting up the system and logging
into the console. Then, in easy steps, it covers:

• Exploring
  the desktop, including understanding the Taskbar, customizing
  the look and feel, examining the filesystem, and browsing the internet
• Commanding
  the system, including getting applications, saving web pages,
  reading and writing text, finding files, adding users, changing permissions,
  and employing the shell
• Animating with
  Scratch - a fun learning environment that enables complete
  beginners to create computer programs visually without writing any
  code
• Programming with Python -
  a high-level (human-readable) programming language that is processed by the
  Python 'interpreter' to produce results
  fast
• Producing games -
  Raspberry Pi ships with a selection of Python games for you to try, but also
  includes the Python 'pygame' module that you can use to make your own games,
  which is covered in Python in easy
  steps
• Developing windowed apps
  with Tkinter, the standard Python module that is shipped with
  the Raspberry Pi, that you can use to create graphical applications
• Driving
  header pins - how to control electrical input and output on the
  Raspberry Pi header from Python scripts, including lighting a lamp, adding more
  buttons and controlling projects

Use
Raspberry Pi in easy steps to have fun going back
to basics and creating your own applications.

Source code
files from the examples featured in this book are available to download free
for checking against your own work.