The book I read to research this post was Programming The Beaglebone Black by Simon Monk which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book tells you all about the Beaglebone Black as well as telling you how to program it in Bonescript a form of javascript. I think it does the former better than the latter and it left me a bit confused about programming it. There are several languages you can program it in. It is a kind of kit computer that retails for $45 and is often described as the American answer to the British Raspberry Pi. I think this model has more features than the Raspberry Pi and comes with an operating system preloaded on a 2 GB SD card. It comes in a black case hence the name and is made by Texas Instruments. It has a 1/2 GB of memory and an ARM processor. The operating system is a variant of Linux. It has a micro USB port and a standard USB with the latter so you can plug in a USB keyboard. It works with any standard USB keyboard. There are several different versions of the Beaglebone with being the latest. You will often use things like a breadboard and a multi meter for experiments. You will solder parts onto the breadboard and this book contains various projects which let you do that. Beaglescript is often characterized by there being words joined together and letters within the command being capitals often called camel script. It is great for doing home automation projects and this along with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino has revolutionized this with them offering so much hardware at such a low price. It has also led to interchangeable open source hardware so you aren’t stuck with getting everything from one manufacturer. Finally you can get any of the book’s scripts at http://www.beaglebonebook.com and before writing a program try and get one from the internet as there are loads and many are free and at worst you might have to make slight alterations.
