With the campaign for the Perl Raspberry Pi ebook underway, we’re releasing a few sample chapters. First one for today is a short intro chapter. Tomorrow, we’ll be releasing one with more meat, covering the basics of the Raspberry Pi range and some other tools you might need to get started. For now, here’s the intro:

Introduction

Welcome! If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been using Perl for a while

and heard about the wonderful Raspberry Pi. If you haven’t programmed Perl

before, I suggest starting with Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz, brian d

foy, and Tom Phoenix. With that said, we try to keep the examples in this book

as simple and concise as possible, sticking to the most basic of expressions

wherever possible. Even without previous Perl experience, you

should be able to grasp the concepts we’ve presented within if you’ve done

any programming in other languages.

No previous electronics experience is necessary. We’ll be covering some of the

basics where appropriate. Most of the projects can be completed without any

soldering. In others, minimal soldering skills may be necessary. However,

being able to solder is a valuable skill to have if you are to grow further

in the field of electronics.

About the Raspberry Pi

In 2012, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was started by employees of Broadcom,

intending to use one of Broadcom’s inexpensive System on a Chip (SoC) fabs

to create a low-cost computer for education. Hobbyists quickly grabbed them

up and started hacking away. Today, the line has expanded to several models,

ranging from the $5 Pi Zero, to the $35 Pi3 (most recently, the Pi3B+).

About Perl

Perl was released by Larry Wall in 1987 inspired by a combination of several

other programming languages. A major revision to Perl 5 was done in 1994. Work

on Perl 6 began in 2000 as a completely separate language from Perl 5 (often

referred to as its “sister” language). Since then, work on Perl 5 has

continued. We’ll be using Perl 5 in this book. We recommend ensuring the most

recent version of Perl is installed before attempting the projects outlined in

this book, that version being 5.26 at the time of writing.

The language was important for the early web, being used in many of the first

CGIs, a simple way to write server applications. Since then, it has evolved

with the rest of the web and is still used by several large companies today.

It also continues as popular language for managing systems, and is installed

by default on the Raspberry Pi.