Dan Nixon - Getting Started with Python and Raspberry Pi

Dan Nixon is a software and electronics engineer living in the north of England. He has past experience of creating software for data analysis, process control, and business intelligence applications. In most of these projects, Python was one of the main languages used.

Dan previously authored another book on the uses of the Raspberry Pi, called Raspberry Pi Blueprints , and has worked on many personal projects that use both Python and the Raspberry Pi.

I would like to thank my mother and father for their support in writing this book and Greg Fenton for his help in testing some of the examples included.

Ankit Aggarwal has been fascinated with science and technology since childhood. He likes to experiment and learn new things. He is a software engineer and researcher by profession and loves computer science. He wants to solve problems using technology. His interests include science, technology, academic research, music, photography, entrepreneurship, DIY, movies, anime, and much more.

He has worked in the fields of networking, distributed systems, pervasive/mobile computing, data science, AI, and computer vision; the list goes on. Ankit has authored IEEE Xplore research papers and is an active contributor to and author of several open source projects. He is socially active, blogs occasionally, and maintains his website at http://ankitaggarwal.me.

In his free time, he reads, takes part in competitive programming, captures photos of nature with a lens, and watches TV shows, movies, and anime. When he is not doing these things, he can be found jogging at the nearest ground.

Neil Broers is a Python developer by day and a hardware hacker by night, building his "Smart Home," one Raspberry Pi at a time. He is an avid technical blogger on www.foo.co.za, where he documents his adventures with home automation. In 2014, he presented a talk on the Raspberry Pi and the Internet of Things at the PyConZA conference in South Africa.

Yash Gajera is an embedded software engineer at Insignex in Anand, India. He studied electronics and communication engineering and graduated in 2014 from the A. D. Patel Institute of Technology, Anand. At Insignex, he has worked on fully automated irrigation control systems. He did his final year project on the Internet of Things. It was selected as the best project from the EC department at Gujarat Technological University in 2014. Yash wrote a Python library for the Zigbee protocol to work with the Raspberry Pi. He also has a lot of experience in embedded system development and web technologies.

Bhavyanshu Parasher holds a BTech degree in computer science engineering. He is currently working toward getting a master's degree in computer science. He has been developing web applications since 2011. He also has experience in developing apps for Android and Linux. He has authored and contributed to various open source projects. Apart from computer science, he is also interested in electronics. He has developed various projects using the Raspberry Pi, including service bots, weather monitoring systems, and data analysis automation tools. When he is not writing code, he spends time writing tutorials on his blog at https://bhavyanshu.me.

David Whale is a software developer living in Essex, UK. He started coding as a schoolboy aged 11, inspired by the school science technician to build his own computer from a kit, and quickly progressed to writing machine code programs because they were "small and fast." These early experiments led to some of his code being used in a saleable educational word game when he was only 13.

David has been developing software professionally ever since, mainly writing small and fast code that goes into electronic products, including automated machinery, electric cars, mobile phones, energy meters, and wireless doorbells.

These days, he runs his own software consultancy called Thinking Binaries. He spends much of his time helping design the next wave of the Internet, called the Internet of Things. This means connecting electronic devices to the Internet. The rest of the time, he volunteers for The Institution of Engineering and Technology, running training courses for teachers, designing and running workshops and clubs for school children, and generally being busy with his Raspberry Pi.

David was the technical editor of the book Adventures in Raspberry Pi . He is a coauthor of the book Adventures in Minecraft and is the technical editor of the official Raspberry Pi magazine, the MagPi .

I was really pleased to be asked to review this new book. Dan Nixon has done an excellent job of getting you started with Python and your Raspberry Pi, and he presents the material in an easy-to-follow format. There are lots of fun ideas and building blocks here, which I hope many readers will extend into bigger and more ambitious projects of their own.