Product: 1449362346

Hacks, in this context, means clever or interesting things to do with your Raspberry Pi. It covers things that make using your Pi easier, to outlandish (waterproof your Pi), impractical (use a Raspberry Pi for geocaching), and fun.

The book itself is well written and easy to read. Even if you don’t try most of the projects, you will very likely pick up useful tips from reading about them.

The focus of the book is a little strange, however. For example, when first talking about formatting the SD card, instead of describing how to do it from Windows or OS X, it only describes how to do it from Linux. Not a big deal, since there are tons of information available online on how to do it from those operating systems. But it would be nice to know how to build a cross compiler toolchain in Windows.

On the Pi, the authors try to describe how to do things in both Pidora and Raspbian, and occasionally some other distributions as well. But it may make things a little more confusing for someone who is not familiar with Linux and just wants to follow a recipe on how to do a specific project.

Most (all?) of the hardware projects involve parts that can be purchased at Adafruit, so they’re not obscure parts that you need to buy off eBay and wait 3 weeks for it to ship. A lot of them are also available from other retailers if you look around.

Overall, I’ll say that this is a fun book to read and covers a really wide scope of projects. Sure, you can probably read about such projects on the Internet for free, but there is some value and convenience in having a collection organized in a book, complete with photos (black and white only) for not very much money. Take a look at the table of contents. Even if you don’t intend to try most of the projects, reading about how you go about doing them will probably teach you some tricks.

Oh, and regarding waterproofing your Pi, just say no :)
Rating: 4
1449362346
Count: 7