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Mastering the Raspberry Pi
Gay W., Apress, Berkeley, CA, 2014. 504 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484201-82-4)
Date Reviewed: Apr 27 2015

I have recently developed considerable interest in single-board, low-consumption computers because of their high flexibility and discrete computational performance. In particular, I stumbled quite by accident on Raspberry Pi. Not having decades of experience in electronics, or at least not having in-depth practical experience with electronic circuits, Raspberry Pi presented an excellent opportunity to experiment with some ideas I’ve had in my mind for a long time, for the price of a low-cost device.

Raspberry Pi is well documented in several books and web resources that extoll its merits and defects. My expectation for this book was definitely that of learning both the micro-architecture and how to think in the language of Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, the book did not answer all my questions. Probably a single book cannot answer my needs, but my overall feeling in reading this book was that of partial satisfaction.

However, the first few chapters are interesting, as they describe in detail the main and very basic concepts that are very useful for Raspberry Pi beginners with no idea where to start. Here, the author explains how to set a static Internet protocol (IP) address and how to connect to the device via secure shell (SSH) or a virtual private network.

Chapter 4 is extremely useful. The power supply is in fact one of the most neglected parts of a system, and Raspberry Pi users must give it extra respect. As stated by the author, Pi does include on-board power regulators, but these regulate only to lower voltages (3.3 V and lower). Thus, each additional circuit that draws power must be considered in the power budget and might be accounted for if noticing signs of insufficient power. Chapter 5, though short, is inspiring. In fact, just recently I found myself faced with the problem (trivial for most) of a dead Pi with a still-blinking light-emitting diode (LED). This chapter explains the secrets of header strips, LEDs, and reset.

Subsequent chapters slowly present in more detail the micro-architecture of Pi. They describe the random access memory (RAM) and the composition of its registers, the central processing unit (CPU) operations and how threads are spawned, the universal serial bus (USB), and secure digital (SD) and network cards. I read these chapters quickly before lingering on chapter 12, which is dedicated to general-purpose input/output (GPIO). Unfortunately, even that was too technical for my personal taste. I found the information on voltages and the identification of the correct pins to perform the tasks that I wanted to do. The examples are, as in the rest of the book, written in C. Perhaps I would have preferred that this chapter was a little more illustrative and less technical. Along the same lines, and consistent with the tenor of the book, the author deals with the communication bus and booting the operating system in the next chapters, before describing some historical peripherals of Pi: the stepper motor, the infrared (IR) receiver, and the H-bridge driver.

The book ends up leaving some questions unanswered and my expectations unsatisfied. This was certainly due to my low confidence about several electronic and technical aspects addressed here, as well as to my expectations, which were definitely geared toward more illustrative and educational content. Nonetheless, I am not sure that even readers who properly understand and appreciate this book will have fully mastered Raspberry Pi. Indeed, the book misses a description of the software counterpart. There are only a few examples of programs written in C. Even here I wished to read something more, perhaps in Python, and hopefully arranged in self-contained projects.

I suggest buying this book only if deeply interested in the hardware aspects of the first Raspberry Pi models.

Reviewer:  Tommaso Mazza Review #: CR143389 (1507-0538)
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