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

The C and C++ languages


Even if you are new to programming you may have come across C and C++ mentioned in literature, webpages, and text books. You'll often see C/C++ written. However, it is important to realize that while C++ is based upon C they are indeed different languages, and useful in different contexts.

We are going to start by giving a brief overview of these languages and explain a bit about them. Following this we will write some experimental programs and explore how the compiler works.

Let's start by delving a bit further into C.

C – a brief introduction

The C programming language has been around since 1970s and was closely tied with the development of the Unix operating system.

In 1972, the computer scientist Dennis Ritchie started the development of C in Assembly language on the PDP-11 Unix system. As we demonstrated in the previous section, Assembly language is converted to machine code, and Ritchie's C language represented another level of abstraction from the computer hardware...