I recently joined the O'Reilly's blogger review program. If you don't know what that is, you can read more about it here. I was accepted by the O'Reilly publisher to become a member of their blogger review program and I could select from different books which I would read and review afterwards.
For the first time, I selected the RaspberryPi Cookbook, written by Simon Monk. Simon Monk is one of the experts in working with and writing about open source hardware. He has written over 10 technical books in this field. He has written books about electronical hacks, how to program Arduino and many other interesting topics.
I read the early, unedited release of the RaspberryPi Cookbook, but this doesn't mean it isn't complete. For a starter in open source hardware (like me), this book is perfect. It explains everything and when I say everything, I mean everything :). It helps you to choose your hardware, it gives you advice about what power supply you should choose for your RaspberryPi based on what you want to use it for. The book guides you through the steps of OS installation and configuration, network setup. The book contains great examples, what to use the RaspberryPi for (NAS, printing server, file sharing over network).
The author kept in mind that some of us do not want to use the RaspberryPi for development or for building robots, electrical systems; so he wrote down some steps on how to use RaspberryPi for playing games like OpenArena (a Quake III clone - for those who are not familiar with it, it's First Person Shooter - FPS game). Also it is exactly described how to use the RaspberryPi as a Media Center using XBMC.
The information which is available in this book can be found spread over the Internet, but there, you do not have it written down in this clean, concise style which is easy to read and understand.
The thing which I like the most in the book is, it contains a lot of useful code samples for the Python programming language so you can immediately start "hacking" on your RaspberryPi.
This book is a definite must buy for me!
CodeProject
