Programming the BeagleBone Black: Getting Started with JavaScript and BoneScript 1st Edition

Simon Monk does a terrific job introducing users to the BeagleBone from essentially opening the box and connecting it to your computer. The examples he provides are quite accessible. The book has served me as a fun tutorial on hacking together simple projects with the BeagleBone Black. If you spend time researching different topics on BeagleBone development, you're likely to encounter more video and text content produced by Mr. Monk. He's a real contributor to the Internet-of-things movement.The price here on Amazon is awesome for this great book. If you're curious about BeagleBone Black development, you won't waste your money buying this book. Almost every section is going to have some nugget of info that you'll consider worth the ten bucks this book costs.

I got this book on Kindle a few months ago, and just started working on it a couple weeks ago. It's pretty easy to get through and I've made good progress in that sense. Coming from (mainly) C/C++ programming with no real experience in javascript, I found the syntax to be pretty easy to pick up. That being said, I personally don't like javascript much because it seems to make it quite easy for undisciplined "hackers" to write code, get it running, and call themselves a programmer. I suppose you can do that in any language, but give me a nice set of compile errors/warnings any day. Anyway, javascript is pretty quick to get going though, and I suppose many people will like that...so that is a plus.I will say that I struggled a bit with my rating on this book. I would have liked to give it a 3.5, quite honestly. The main problem(s) I've found is that there are fairly annoying little inconsistencies between the code and the text description, and these can trip you up a bit. One of the more obvious issues is in chapter 9, where the author uses port "8080" throughout the textual descriptions for making his web server connections. However the code actually uses port 8085--so unless you figure that out, it's not going to work for you, because the Beaglebone server simply isn't listening on port 8080. I did get it to work quite easily because I've worked with sockets and ports a fair amount in other languages; however I wonder if other folks will struggle a bit if they don't have much of that sort of experience?Also, I agree with the reviewer(s) who've opined that perhaps a more rigorous explanation of actually running the code is in order. For instance, sometimes the latest version of cloud9 (in Debian, anyway) doesn't actually KILL the process running on the CPU when you hit the stop button in the IDE. I mean, the IDE *says* the code is stopped, but if you check "ps aux | grep <keyword>" you'll find that there is still a rogue process running. Now that isn't the author's fault of course, and maybe he has never experienced this--but if it does happen to you and then you try to run some web-based code in chapter 9, the port is probably still bound...and in that case will fail. So you'd better be somewhat skilled at using the console output messages (at a minimum), in order to help figure things out when they won't run as you expect them to. I guess my point is that it's hard to believe that the author never saw such a thing, so a few words of wisdom on what to watch for (and how to deal with it) would have been helpful. Maybe he hasn't experienced it, so this comment will help folks who do experience the problem.Finally, I also do agree with the reviewer that stated that it would have been nice to get a bit more background on the Linux OS under the hood. For instance, the author seems to use the node package manager (npm) to update node.js throughout the book--but unless I've missed it, he never really seems to go into detail on what it's for...and why/how it differs from the OS's package manager (opkg or apt-get, if you're on Debian). Again, a person can research this on their own--and I do think there's a certain degree of confidence that comes with doing so, and solving one's own problems as such. However when you "don't know what you don't know," it can be quite helpful to get a gentle nudge or two in the right direction.Overall though, I think this is a pretty good book. Since you can't assign half-stars, I gave the author 4 stars because the book does do a good job on most things. Indeed the examples are a bit simplistic in most cases (until the one using jQuery in chapter 9, lol!), but I wouldn't necessarily call that a bad thing. In fact I think it's helpful to have a concrete, simple example, because it makes it easier to learn the basics--so long as the simple example covers the them. And in fact I think the author does a pretty good job along those lines, and I find myself going back over the code repeatedly...and learning a bit more about the different parts, each time I do.So I would recommend this book to anyone looking to get going on the Beaglebone platform. Whether you're running the new Beaglebone Black, or the original Beaglebone (the white one), the examples work very well, especially if you're using the most recent version of whichever distro you so chose to use. I'm using the latest version of Debian on the original Beaglebone, and thus far haven't run into anything that a little time spent with Google can't solve.Knock on wood...

This book delivers exactly what the tittle says "getting started" into programming the BBB. An easy yet informative read, in typical Simon Monk style, simple, clear examples & information that is straight to the point. There's enough to learn the basics of Javascript, Bonescript, the board layout, I/O pins & setting up simple projects. And of course the bargain price makes it well worth it in "bang for bucks".Although I did notice a few typos eg p70 - there is no space after the function statement ie. functionledOn & again lower on the page functioflashmessage & possibly a few other instances.

Small book, true, but it has some good information and like the title says, it concentrates mostly on programming. However, it does have some simple hardware project examples. Not a definitive reference, but holy cow it's less than $11 at the time of this review and ships free with Prime, so what more could you want for a beginner.

Very informative as a 1st book for the BBB. Lots of examples of JavaScript and BoneScript and all seemed to work as expected. Beware it was published for a BBB running Angstrom rather than Debian Linux, so there might be some hidden surprises that I have not found yet. All the source code works either way. There is a good chapter on setting up a web server on the BBB and accessing it over a TCP/IP network, including sending commands to the BBB using a socket connection. The server puts up a page, you write code to use that page to do something (I'm operating a heater and pump using a Relay Cape on the BBB), then command the BBB from that page.