Have you ever looked at a gadget and wondered how it worked? Do you want to create your own cool and exciting electronics project but do not know how to get started? Your decision to start reading this book is an excellent first step.

In this book, we will teach you everything you need to get started with the Arduino. Everything from basic electronics and prototyping to setting up the Arduino development environment and programming is covered. This book also has numerous sample projects to show you how to use this knowledge with real-world examples. Before we get to all that fun stuff, let's a look at the Arduino itself and get familiar with it.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• What the Arduino boards are
• How to power the Arduino boards
• What Arduino shields are
• What the pins on the Arduino boards do
• Learn about generic and compatible Arduino boards

Arduino is a company, development boards, community and a way of thinking. As you will soon find out, Arduino is also the name of a bar in northern Italy. While we could begin this book by writing several chapters on everything that the Arduino name stands for, that is not what this book is about. This book is about teaching you how to use the Arduino development board to build fun and exciting projects. Anywhere in this book, unless noted otherwise, when we refer to the Arduino we will be referring to the Arduino development boards. However, we do believe to really understand the Arduino board, you should at least have a basic understanding of its history; therefore, we will start off by giving you a brief history of the board and its predecessors.