# Getting Started

# Welcome

Welcome to the Boost libraries! By the time you've completed this tutorial, you'll be at least somewhat comfortable with the contents of a Boost distribution and how to go about using it.

# What's Here

This document is designed to be an extremely gentle introduction, so we included a fair amount of material that may already be very familiar to you. To keep things simple, we also left out some information intermediate and advanced users will probably want. At the end of this document, we'll refer you on to resources that can help you pursue these topics further.

# Preliminaries

We use one typographic convention that might not be immediately obvious: italic text in examples is meant as a descriptive placeholder for something else, usually information that you'll provide. For example:

    $ echo "My name is your name"

Here you're expected to imagine replacing the text “your name” with your actual name.

# Ready?

Let's go!