We have received permission to share the secret (ahem!) Black Friday/Cyber Monday coupon code “DEAL” for those wishing to purchase the Early Release version of Matt Richardson & Shawn Wallace’s work-in-progress Getting Started with Raspberry Pi book at a 50% discount today from O’Reilly/Make:

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form — the author’s raw and unedited content as he or she writes — so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. You’ll also receive updates when significant changes are made, new chapters as they’re written, and the final ebook bundle.

The Raspberry Pi platform was developed to lower the barriers to teaching young people programming, and it is also popular with hardware hackers and hobbyists who may have a project that needs more computing power than a microcontroller.

The first section of the book gets you up and running; after the first chapter the reader will have installed the operating system, will have an understanding of all the hardware features of the Pi, and will have set up the small computer with the correct power source and peripherals. This is followed by a quick start user guide, with enough context and examples of commands to get around the computer.

The book also provides instructions for getting started with programming in Scratch and Python, and examples of using the general purpose input and output interface. Finally, the reader is guided through two hands on hardware hacking projects.

Read more.

Adafruit will probably consider offering the final book when it is ultimately printed, but for now it is nice to follow along while the book is woven together by these two talented tech writers! Check out the “Books” category in our store for other books on Raspberry Pi and other topics!