In the mid-2000s, some of the staff at the University of Cambridge noticed that there were fewer and fewer students applying to study Computer Science each year, and that they had less and less experience. Something had to be done. The answer was the Raspberry Pi — a small, inexpensive computer that makes programming as accessible and as much fun as possible. The idea is that students can play with the Raspberry Pi during their spare time, and in the process, learn valuable core Computer Science skills. Since its creation, many other groups have discovered how useful the Raspberry Pi can be, including schools, adults who want to brush up on their skills with technology, and electronics hobbyists.

This chapter describes how to get a Raspberry Pi computer up and running. Once this is done, the Pi behaves just like any other ordinary computer, and is capable of standard tasks such as browsing the web and playing games. We will learn in later chapters that the Raspberry Pi is also capable of performing some tasks which ordinary computers can't do. The following figure shows a Raspberry Pi board: