Don’t Buy a Raspberry Pi Just to Learn Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi isn’t really a skill in itself. It’s not something you’ll put on your CV like Windows administration or Office use. So if you’re buying a Raspberry Pi just to become “good at Raspberry Pi”, you’re missing the point.
For me, Raspberry Pi is like a training ground where I can try out different skills, like Linux, coding, and electronics. These are the really valuable skills to put on your CV.
Back in the days, when I learned Linux, I had basically two options:
- I was testing it on my laptop, which was cool and safe, but I was breaking everything every few days by using the wrong commands or reinstalling the whole system with a different distribution.
- Or, working directly on the school server or company production server. But I was very limited (or afraid to break anything). That wasn’t ideal either.
Using a Raspberry Pi pretty much solves that. If you need to reinstall it, no problem. It’s not your main computer, so there’s nothing essential on it. It only takes a few minutes, and you’re all set to try something new. If it breaks, you start again.
If you want a clearer path than jumping from tutorial to tutorial, my book gives you a step-by-step roadmap to really understand your Raspberry Pi.
Check the book here
For Linux, you can do the same with a virtual machine, which I still use every now and then for experiments. But for coding and electronics, the Raspberry Pi is the perfect tool to help you learn quickly and safely.
And so when you buy a Raspberry Pi, that’s what you buy in particular: a safe place to learn and experiment, without breaking your main computer or server.
Yeah, we’ve got a bunch of projects on RaspberryTips that need a Raspberry Pi, but the point of those isn’t really to teach you “Raspberry Pi”.
- Setting up a VPN server on a Raspberry Pi will teach you a lot about networking and security.
- Hosting a website at home can help understand some Linux theory, databases and programming.
- You can make your own robot kit with Raspberry Pi to see how electronics, AI, and coding work together to do something cool.
The skills you gain by building these projects will transfer directly to servers, cloud computing, or software development. It’s way more fun to learn about them with a clear goal when working on a Raspberry Pi project than by reading 1,000 pages of books about cloud computing theory 🙂
My suggestion is to find a project that includes the skill you’re interested in learning and get a Raspberry Pi for it. You’ll be way more motivated with a clear goal in mind, and you’ll learn that skill super fast.
Do you need help finding the right project to build next? Use my Raspberry Pi Project Finder to find the best match based on your current hardware and skills.
