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Raspberry-PI


wotnobivvy

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Has anyone tried one of these? I am thinking of getting one for my 15yr old lad for Christmas. I realise I might have to buy a guide of some sort and a few peripherals to attach, like screen, keyboard and mouse

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we use them here at school;

fine for very very basic stuff and such. but not good enough for anything truly decent if you ask me.

they can be configured as a music server or print server etc etc ands they are fairly easy to program.

they will output to a standard hdmi; and usb keyboard and mouse.

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It's for the lad to do a bit of really basic programming, as at school all they do is learn the use of Microsoft Office, which won't help him much in his chosen career of IT. As long as he can write a program that does something he will be happy. I would appreciate any advice on which text/instruction books would be best, as I only have a limited knowledge of Basic, being brought up on IBM mainframes ( I am that old !!) I only know COBOL and Assembler.

The two best times to go fishing are when it's raining and when it's not

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That's what they're for, and there's no denying that a machine which doesn't do anything much unless you learn to code is an incentive to learn. I learnt BASIC on a VIC20 and assembly language on a C64... Raspberry pi supports Java, probably the most useful of the languages on offer in terms of modern programming concepts. Still widely used as a teaching language.

 

I guess the cool thing to be programming (if there is such a thing) is mobile phone apps. Does he have a smartphone?

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its a smart phone if you take into account its ability to lose RIM billions of dollars and lead to their ultimate collapse!! for destroying things its really quite clever!! LOL

 

as for a career in IT: specify what he wants to do in IT:

tech stuff he wont touch programming at all

game design he wont touch it unless he choose to program AI; the rest is art and 3d modelling and animation based: each very different fields of understanding and learning

software development: java will help in its basic form but very little beyond that

web development: he wont touch programming apart from javacsript to dev his own website scripts etc etc and a PI wont help with that.

 

in all honesty the most ive seen even the "accomplished" kids produce from a PI is a print server or basic music server: basically allowing you to stream print jobs or music direct from an SD card in the unit.

 

to be honest lego mindstorms sets ive seen produce far better things and be far more creative that a PI.

 

for game design: you would be better to buy him Gamemaker or Scratch or something similar like Robomind. they all allow for basic programming and allow for a a lot of expansion of technique and clever thinking as his skills grow.

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Many thanks for the info guys. I will go away and cogitate, then have a word with the lad

The two best times to go fishing are when it's raining and when it's not

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Hmm... There are still lots of people making decent money writing code. I fell into corporate software development in the 90's, almost by accident. I was building small systems, VB, VBA with Excel and Access, that kind of thing. From there we went to distributed apps, business logic in VB6 middleware in Microsoft Transaction Server, ASP front end, SQL server database. We were pushing VB6 pretty hard, then Microsoft .NET came along and made it easy. We standardised on C#, trained everyone in UML/RUP, did some good stuff. I left to be chief cook and bottle washer of IT for a start-up (I'm still there nearly a decade later), most of the other guys eventually became contractors and they're still making faintly obscene daily rates writing systems in C#.

 

In my current role, I fairly often speak to IT dev staff in UK financial institutions who are tasked with integrating their systems with data feeds in and out of our systems. There are still plenty of them. My wife estimates that there are getting on for a thousand programmers working for her employer, most of them contractors or externals, many of them offshored but by no means all. One of my friends, a former colleague and now a contractor went out to India for the first time and came back saying the gig was up, they've got thousands and thousands of programmers. He subsequently worked with them, and changed his tune. He doesn't see good UK based people going hungry any time soon.

 

The UI stuff may require less and less "real" programming ability, but the underlying systems still need to be engineered by people who code well. I think anyone wanting to work in that field still needs a solid grounding in object orientated programming (Java will do, I think C# is nicer), a good understanding of the principles of relational databases and SQL, up to date knowledge of presentation tier technologies and a good basic grounding in the principles of networked computing.

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