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Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

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40hz:
[Continuing the aside}

Blimey I had completely forgotten about Modular! A blast from the past - and yes it was a great Pascal-like language.

I do remember having fun with Forth - though it seems less like high level programming and more like a cross between a Mensa logic puzzle and assembly language!
-Carol Haynes (June 21, 2012, 11:57 AM)
--- End quote ---

Sorta. They did call it a mid-level language. And with good reason. FORTH's methodology is weird by today's standards. But for real-time controllers and things that interfaced with the real world you couldn't beat it. Especially with the limitations and clock speeds of the 8 and 16-bit hardware you had to work with back then. It screamed on a Zilog Z-80 chip. I used to run it (FigFORTH) on my C64. It was a lot easier than writing 6510 assembly via HesMon. You could program some pretty cool things for the SID music chip that way.

FORTH still has its supporters. And it's still used to this day. Last I heard there was a version of it you could run on an Arduino. My understanding is it's not a difficult environment to port. The core kernal is tiny. Most of FORTH is written in FORTH. And if something you wanted wasn't a part of the language, you could always add it yourself fairly easily. Much easier than trying to master an "everything plus the kitchen sink" framework like Net or Mono. Sleeker and much easier to understand too. That's one major reason FORTH became so popular for a while. You could engineer your own private FORTH-based language if you wanted to. ( Same went for Modula now that I think about it.)

Carol Haynes:
If you want to play with Forth a good place to start is: http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/forth.shtml

4wd:
....
Quite a range out there. The $19 board freaks me out. But, there are lots of options. -Renegade (June 20, 2012, 02:47 PM)
--- End quote ---

You've also got the Android 4.0 based MK802, (Engadget link), for $78, (DX link).

Target:
at the risk of going off on a tangent (HA!) these little boards have caught my attention of late, and I would like to learn a bit more but I don't know where to start

Can anyone recommend some good introductory resources - web based stuff is good, but good books would suit me better

EDIT: I'm guessing as total noob that arduino is probably a good pick, but I'm open to advice from all you experts...

40hz:
^Which board you should pick will depend on what you want to accomplish.

The Arundino is probably best suited for gadget and controller type projects. There's a huge hobbyist community in love with the thing. And for good reason. It's probably the best documented of all the tiny PCs because of that interest. A quick check of Amazon will point you to several books that are available for it. Make magazine does quite a few Arundino based projects, and there's lots more on the web.

If you're looking more for a small form factor general purpose PC, something like the PandaBoard is a better choice in that it can run most flavors of Windows or Linux. So anything that applies to those operating systems will apply to the board as well.

The RasberryPi is very much like the PandaBoard except it's more stripped down and less ready to go straight out of the box. However, that makes sense as it was designed to be a learning/experimenter's board. And now that it's shipping, a very active community seems to be developing around it. If they can get the manufacturing backlog straightened out I think it will eventually become as popular as the Arundino. From what I can see there's only one real book available for it called Beginning Rasberry Pi. It's only available as a Kindle edition (hmm...is this the shape of things to come?), but I suspect there will be other titles out shortly.

So...what's best?

Depends on what you want to do. :)

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