Notes:
What am I going to learn?
This user manual is different. Don’t expect a dry-as-dust description of how to plug things in or where to find your serial number. And you certainly won’t learn how to create a spreadsheet or a presentation. That’s really not computer science, it’s something else entirely. Instead, think of this manual, along with your Raspberry Pi, as a “computer science set” . Have you ever been given a chemistry set? With a chemistry set, you can make lots of bangs, smells and odd-coloured goop to learn all about elements, molecules and compounds. We’re not going to make odd-coloured goop, but we will use experiments to discover how to program a computer to create your own games and animations, how to make graphics appear on screen just by typing in the right code (just like the developers of your favourite games do), how to get a cat to do your maths homework for you, and much more. By doing all this, you will learn the basic principles of computer science . And that’s your first step on the journey to becoming a real computer programmer, a games developer, an über-hacker just like in the movies (only cooler and staying strictly within the law) and many other things besides. Exactly what, depends on you. When we wrote this manual, our aim was for it to be suitable for most people of eight years and older. But that doesn’t mean it’s for eight year olds. This book is for anyone and everyone who is curious to know more about computing and creating computer programs. If you don’t have computer-programming experience but you want to get some and you’re looking for a place to start, this is it. We begin the manual with some relatively easy experiments in computer science. Things then get progressively more challenging with each successive exercise. Try to spend time with each experiment and, once you’ve got an exercise doing what the manual says it should, feel free to change the code to see what happens: it’s one of the best ways to learn.
Who is this manual for?
Will I break it?
You can’t break your Raspberry Pi by doing any of the experiments in this book, but you might just surprise yourself with what you can achieve. You will be working through and learning genuinely difficult but exciting concepts, and laying the foundations for even more exciting discoveries in the future.
So, without further delay, have everyone in the room stand back: we’re going to do computer science!
Introduction
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