Operation Manual

Introduction
5
Congratulations! You have in your possession a Raspberry Pi. A small
but powerful computer designed to help you understand and explore
the almost-magical world of computing. Use it wisely; it’s an object of
great power.
Notes:
Hello, Raspberry Pi users
Chapter 0
What is the Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a computer, very like the computers with which you’re
already familiar. It uses a different kind of processor, so you can’t install Microsoft
Windows on it. But you can install several versions of the Linux operating system
that look and feel very much like Windows. If you want to, you can use the
Raspberry Pi to surf the internet, send an email or write a letter using a word
processor. But you can also do so much more.
Easy to use but powerful, affordable and (as long as you’re careful) difficult to
break, the Raspberry Pi is the perfect tool for aspiring computer scientists. What
do we mean by computer science? We mean learning how computers work so you
can make them do what you want them to do, not what someone else thinks you
should do with them.
And who do we mean by computer scientists? We mean you. You may
finish this manual and decide you want to be next Tim Berners Lee, but even if you
don’t, we hope you have fun, learn something new and get a feel for how computers
work. Because no matter what you do in life, computers are bound to be part of it.