Chapter 1. Getting Started

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer (SBC), which means that—as the name suggests—it is a complete computer system built on a single printed circuit board (PCB). Like most SBCs, it doesn’t come out of the box ready to power up and use. It has the same basic components built into the board as any other computer has: a central processing unit (CPU), memory, video processor, audio, and networking.

The one thing it doesn’t have out of the box is a storage device. On a computer or laptop, most people use a hard drive that contains the operating system and all their files. With a Raspberry Pi, you use an SD card as the main storage device. So before we can tackle the ins and outs of making things using Linux, we ...

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