What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, will check the basic equipment that we need to use with this book. We will have to look into the other peripherals that we buy and see how the Raspberry works. We then will be seeing how to flash the newest Raspbian image to our SD card.

Chapter 2, Preparing the Network, will illustrate how to set up LAN and a wireless connection to our network and connect to the Internet. We will set some network benchmarks and understand some limitations. We will also look into Dynamic DNS hosting.

Chapter 3, Configuring Extra Features, will illustrate how to update the software and the firmware of the Raspberry Pi. We will learn about the watchdog and how to buy extra decoder licenses.

Chapter 4, Using a Fast PHP Web Server and Database, will illustrate how to set up a fast web server using nginx with PHP, and decide if we want to use MySQL or SQLite.

Chapter 5, Setting Up a File Server, will illustrate how to attach a USB storage medium and how to format it. We will not only look into various ways of sending data to the Raspberry Pi, but also how to share media on the network. As an extra task, we will look into creating the hardware RAID!

Chapter 6, Setting Up the Game Servers, will explore open source game engines that are available on the repository. We will also have a sneak peek into the Jessie repository that is in beta testing.

Chapter 7, Bitcoins – Pools and Mining, will illustrate the concept of cryptographic currencies, and we will try and understand what Bitcoin is. We will set up a wallet and learn how to send and receive coins. We will also venture into mining equipment and learn about mining pools.

Chapter 8, Streaming Live HD Video, will explore the camera module and decide if we should use FFmpeg or grstreamer. We will compile a custom version of Nginx and start streaming videos to the World Wide Web!

Chapter 9, Setting Up a Media Center, will illustrate how to finally attach an HD monitor and play some videos that we recorded or downloaded earlier. We will also look into RaspBMC and the benefits of running it as a dedicated media player.