Ben here – Liz is currently non-functional due to her body having no idea what time it was when she arrived at the office this morning after landing back from San Francisco at the weekend.

Raspberry Pi Projects is a fantastic book from Wiley, the publishers of Eben and Gareth’s Raspberry Pi User Guide and Carrie Anne’s Adventures in Raspberry Pi. It’s written by two great Pioneers: Dr. Andrew Robinson (creator of PiFace) and Mike Cook (co-author of Raspberry Pi for Dummies and creator of many awesome hardware projects).

The book comprises of 16 practical software and hardware projects for the Raspberry Pi – all put together and documented by Andrew and Mike (with help) that are designed to help you better understand the system and become more confident in development of a range of projects. The projects are handily presented in rough order of difficulty, starting with the easier ones to get you going – and move on to more complex ones.

The book covers interactive text based games in Python, graphical games with PyGame, interactive game hardware, application with PiFace Digital, making a toy chicken send tweets, chaotic pendulum hamonographs, car racing and more – as well as a chapter on Minecraft by Sean McManus, and Home Automation by Jonathan Evans.

I wrote on here recently about things you can do with your Raspberry Pi – and this book is crammed full of amazing examples. Books like this and Carrie Anne’s will guide you through a given project and provide you with learning points along the way, which is a great way to learn about Linux, Python, hardware hacking or anything. Beginner or not you’ll learn lots by following the guide set out by experts such as these.

Here are some examples of the projects Mike put together:

PacMan made in Python PyGame:

Disco lights:

See more previews of the contents of the book on Mike’s blog!

Raspberry Pi Projects is available from Amazon and also as a two-part e-book from Wiley: Part 1 & Part 2