Now that you are ready to begin programming, you'll need to choose a language. There are many available, such as C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and a great deal of other possibilities. I'm going to initially introduce you to Python for two reasons: it is a simple language that is intuitive and very easy to use, and it uses a lot of the open source functionality of the robotics world. We'll also cover a bit of C/C++ in this chapter, as some features are only available in C/C++. However, it makes sense to start with Python. To work through the examples in this section, you'll need a version of Python installed. Fortunately, the basic Raspbian system has one already, so you are ready to begin.

We are only going to cover some of the very basic concepts here. If you are new to programming, there are a number of different websites that provide interactive tutorials. If you'd like to practice some of the basic programming concepts in Python using these tutorials...