The following steps will show you how to download Raspbian Lite:

A screenshot of the Raspbian download page, with both Full and Lite download links

Luckily, the tools for burning OS images to SD cards have evolved arcane command-line tools that can overwrite your computer's hard drive as easily as it can the SD card. My current favorite is called Etcher, and it can be downloaded for any platform at https://etcher.io/, as shown in the following steps:

A screenshot of the Etcher program running on a Mac

A few minutes will pass as Etcher burns the image to your micro SD card, then verifies that it is present on the card. Once this is done, remove and reinsert the micro SD card so that your computer recognizes it as a drive again; the drive should be namedboot. We're not quite done editing the image files yet, so Etcher's polite attempt to eject the micro SD card drive needs to be ignored.

We need to edit and create some files on our Raspberry Pi's image in order to be able to access it with SSH when we turn on the Raspberry Pi. First, we'll set up the Wi-Fi using the following steps:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
    ssid="yourNetworkSSID"
    psk="yourNetworkPasswd"
}

A list of files on the micro SD drive, once I've made my edits

Once this is all done, fully eject the microSD drive, take the microSD card and insert it into the Raspberry Pi. We're now ready to boot up the Raspberry Pi and start installing software.

Once the micro SD card is inserted, plug your power source into your Raspberry Pi. A red and green LED should light up. The red LED should be solid—this is the power indicator. The green light will flicker on and off—this is the LED that indicates activity. The Raspberry Pi should take a maximum of a minute or so to boot up once you've plugged it in. Next, we'll SSH in. 

SSHing from a Linux or Mac

If you're on a Mac or Linux machine, you'll open up a Terminal and type the following:

ssh [email protected]

If you're successful, you'll see a question appear, asking about the authenticity of the host. Respond by typing yes and hitting Enter. You'll then be asked for a password, which is raspberry, as shown in the following screenshot: 

Successful SSH into a Raspberry Pi from a Mac Terminal

Once you've entered the password, you should see the following:

Successful login to a Raspberry Pi via SSH from a Mac

SSHing from Windows

In order to SSH from a Windows machine, you'll need to use a program called PuTTY. You can get it on https://putty.org/. But first, you'll want your Raspberry Pi's IP address. You'll need a monitor, an HDMI cable, and a USB keyboard. Once you have these, go through the following steps:

1. Plug the monitor, HDMI cable, and USB keyboard into the Raspberry Pi before booting it up. Then plug in the power supply.
2. When it prompts you for a username, type pi. When it asks for a password, enter raspberry. Once you are logged in, type ifconfig. You should see a lot of information appear.
3. Look for the wlan0 section and the inet address under that heading. For the following output, the IP is 192.168.1.106, as shown in the following screenshot. Write this IP down. Then, you can unplug the display and the keyboard—you won't need them again:

Getting the IP address from the Terminal

4. Once you have the IP address for your Raspberry Pi, you can boot up PuTTY. The window that opens is the configuration window, as shown in the following screenshot: 

The PuTTY configuration window

5. Type the IP address that you obtained into the field labeled Host Name (or IP address) and click the Open button. You'll be asked about the authenticity of the host (only the first time you connect). Select Yes. Then enter Pi as the username and raspberry as the password when prompted. Once that's done, you should see the following:

Successful login to the Raspberry Pi with PuTTY

Now that everyone's logged in, let's set up our Raspberry Pi for our projects!