Congratulations! You've completed the first stage of your journey. You have your Raspberry Pi up and working. No gathering dust in the bin for this piece of hardware. It is now ready to start connecting to all sorts of interesting devices in all sorts of interesting ways. You should have installed a Debian operating system, learned how to connect all the appropriate peripherals, and even mastered how to access the system remotely so that the only connections you need are a power supply cable and a LAN cable.

You are now ready to start commanding your Raspberry Pi to do something. The next chapter will introduce you to the Linux operating system, the Emacs text editor, and also show you some basic programming concepts in both the Python and C programming languages. You'll then be ready to add open source software to inexpensive hardware to start building your robotics projects.