Raspberry Pi in a Networking Matrix

Nothing to do with the movie. It is more of a matrix of the ways the Raspy can be used for various networking solutions. All of it is described in the well-known and useful form of recipes in the Rick Golden's book Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook. 

All about the networking

Very background-enriching, because it gives advises to people who just bought their first Pis and wonder where to start from. It really is very suitable as the first book to read on the matter. There's a little something for everyone.

It is pretty exhaustive regarding the different possible installment the Raspberry Pi can be used for. In any case (for media center, for desktop, as a gaming platform, etc.) the hardware set-up is defined thoroughly. 

The cookbook formula is concise and at the same time gives the right information in a familiar way. Every recipe has the same structure and usually (at least in the cookbooks of PACKT Publishing) consists of:

• Recipe title or theme - a bit of introduction to the current task.
• Getting ready section - list of all the nuts and bolts that should be at hand.
• How to do it... section - the actual work to be done.
• How it works... section - thorough explanation of what just happened.
• There's more... section - some interesting (and sometimes enlightening) additional information.
• See also section - set of the most relevant to the current task links.

The How it works... sections are usually the educating part of a recipe. The There's more... sections can share different points of view to the topic. I especially liked the way the Raspberry Pi was compared to the game consoles in the way that any SD card with a different OS put on it could turn it into a completely different machine. Just like the cartridges with different games. It is obvious, but such exact comparison never occurred to me.

The book can roughly be divided into two parts. The first three chapters form something like an introduction to Raspberry Pi with a Linux primer. The Rest of the chapters (fourth and fifth) take into account a more advanced topics like sharing folders through a local network, setting up file server, accessing devices (USB disks) through a network ... And more - installing and running web servers (Apache, lighttpd and Nginx) and even a wiki (MediaWiki instance).

Starting as a book for the utter beginner in the field has always been a bit disappointing for me, because I thought the usual Raspberry Pi enthusiast is supposed to be technically literate at some level. But then I saw some article showing how a classroom in Africa is powered by Raspberry Pis. This made me realize that the number of enthusiasts should be much smaller than the number of actual users who are not supposed to know much about computers. So Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook could be the perfect fit for the major user-base of the tiny credit-card sized computer.

Reading this piece of literature was very enjoyable. From a bit different perspective it is even a mild and gradual introduction to some of the Linux (mostly Debian) basics and networking as a whole. Although many of the concepts were not new to me, all of the additional tiny bits of info enriched every single recipe. And this is good because that's how a set of how-tos turns into a real and interesting book. Good job Mr. Golden.