What you need for this book

You will need several hardware and software components to make all the projects found in this book. Of course, you can just read the description of the projects and learn this way. However, I really recommend actually doing the projects yourself to really learn about how to use the Arduino Ethernet shield to build exciting networking applications.

The hardware components required are detailed at the beginning of each chapter. However, what you will really need for all the projects is an Arduino board.

All the projects of the book are based on the Arduino Uno board:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno

For all the projects of this book, you will also need the Arduino Ethernet shield:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardEthernet

On the software side, there is some software that we will use in all the chapters of the book. The first software that we will use in all the chapters is the Arduino IDE that you need to install. You can download it from:

http://arduino.cc/en/main/software

The Ethernet library itself is contained within the Arduino IDE, so you won't need to install it yourself. There are also several external libraries you will need, but these are detailed in each chapter where they are necessary.

You will also need a web server running on your computer for some of the projects. I recommend using software that integrates a web server and a database, and that handles all the details for you.

If you are working on Windows, I recommend using EasyPHP:

http://www.easyphp.org/

Under OS X, I recommend using MAMP:

http://www.mamp.info/

For Linux, you can follow the instructions provided at the following link to install a web server:

http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/lamp

Make sure that the server is running at this point; we are going to use it in several projects in this book.