Raspberry Pi, the world's smallest computer designed based on the open-source Linux system, has a very strong demand and numerous players around the world. If you're looking for a platform with great computing power to design and build your software or hardware projects, then Raspberry Pi is just what you need, and the hacking skills in Raspberry Pi Hacks this book will give you plenty of great ideas.

Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer based on Linux operating system, only has the size of a credit card. The original purpose of researching and developing Raspberry Pi is to promote the basic computer science education in schools through low-cost hardware and free software. But soon it got the favor of computer and hardware enthusiasts - they started to use it to learn programming, and create a variety of novel, fashionable hardware & software applications.

The kernel of Linux is responsible for handling all the interactions between CPU and outside world, deciding the order of all programs share the processor time, effectively managing hundreds or thousands of processes to share the limited memory available in system, skillfully planning the data transmission as a whole to save the time consumed by CPU on waiting for the slower hard drive. Therefore, in-depth study of the most essential parts of the Linux kernel lets you completely understand what makes Linux run normally and why it can work well in various system distributions.

Raspberry Pi is a low-cost microcomputer well liked by makers around the world, comes with small volume (only the size of a credit card) and powerful functionality. For entry-level enthusiasts, behind Raspberry Pi, there are strong community support, rich resources, as well as experience share from fan users, which is very attractive.

Ruby is a simple and fast object-oriented programming scripting language that is obviously younger than other similar programming languages (such like Perl or Python). It was written by Yukihiro Matsumoto from Japan (started in 1993 and finished in 1995). The inspiration and characteristics of Ruby are mainly from Perl, Squeak/Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada and Lisp programming languages.