Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By : Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By: Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto

Overview of this book

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, a new series of the popular compact computer is available for you to build cheap, exciting projects and learn about programming. In this book, we explore Raspberry Pi 2’s hardware through a number of projects in a variety of programming languages. We will start by exploring the various hardware components in detail, which will provide a base for the programming projects and guide you through setting up the tools for Assembler, C/C++, and Python. We will then learn how to write multi-threaded applications and Raspberry Pi 2’s multi-core processor. Moving on, you’ll get hands on by expanding the storage options of the Raspberry Pi beyond the SD card and interacting with the graphics hardware. Furthermore, you will be introduced to the basics of sound programming while expanding upon your knowledge of Python to build a web server. Finally, you will learn to interact with the third-party microcontrollers. From writing your first Assembly Language application to programming graphics, this title guides you through the essentials.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction to web servers


At its heart, a web server is a system that handles requests via HTTP. You will see the term web server applied in a number of ways, including in reference to the hardware that the software stack runs on, as well as the actual software application itself.

Typically, when visiting a web server you will have data returned to your web browser in the format of HTML, images, JavaScript, and CSS, among other formats. These are what we call web pages, although the web server can also return data in other formats as well, such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).

All of these data types are returned via an HTTP request, which handles transferring the information from the web server to the user's web browser (or another application that wishes to interact with the server).

Let's now look at the HTTP protocol in a little more detail to understand how this works.

HTTP requests

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was invented at CERN (European...