Читать книгу Raspberry Pi For Dummies - McManus Sean, Evans Jonathan, Sean McManus - Страница 20

The Raspberry Pi is a fully featured computer, and you can do almost anything with it that you can do with a desktop computer.

Instead of running Windows or macOS, the Raspberry Pi uses an operating system called Linux. It’s a leading example of open source, a completely different philosophy to the commercial software industry. Rather than being created within the heavily guarded walls of a company, with its design treated as a trade secret, Linux is built by companies and expert volunteers working together. Anyone is free to inspect and modify the source code (a bit like the recipe) that makes it work. You don’t have to pay to use Linux, and you’re allowed to share it with other people, too.

You probably won’t be able to run the software you have on your other computers on your Raspberry Pi. It won’t run Windows or Mac software, and not all Linux software works on the Raspberry Pi. But a lot of Linux software that is compatible with the Raspberry Pi is available and is free of charge.

The Raspberry Pi has a graphical windows desktop to start and manage programs (see Chapter 4) as well as a shell for accepting text commands (see Chapter 5). You can use it for browsing the Internet (see Chapter 4), for word processing and spreadsheets (see Chapter 6), or for editing photos (see Chapter 7). You can use it for playing back music or video (see Chapter 8) or for playing games (see Chapter 19). You can use the built-in software to write your own music, too (see Chapter 14). It’s the perfect tool for homework, but it’s also a useful computer for writing letters, managing your accounts, and paying bills online.

The Raspberry Pi is at its best, however, when it’s being used to learn how computers work, and how you can create your own programs or electronics projects using them. It comes with Scratch (see Chapter 9), a visual programming language that enables people of all ages to create their own animations and games while learning some of the core concepts of computer programming along the way.

It also comes with Python (see Chapter 11), a professional programming language used by YouTube, Google, and Industrial Light & Magic (the special effects gurus for the Star Wars films), among many others.

It has GPIO pins on it that you can use to connect up your own circuits to the Raspberry Pi, so you can use your Raspberry Pi to control other devices and to receive and interpret signals from them. In Part 5, we show you how to build some electronic projects controlled by the Raspberry Pi. In Chapter 21, we show you some add-ons you can connect to the GPIO pins.