# Getting Started

Use the latest version of this Getting Started guide

The Boost website version of this Getting Started guide may have updated information, such as the location of additional installers or improved installation procedures, so you might want use that version if you've got an Internet connection available.

# 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.

# Alternate method: Boost.CMake

There is a cmake build for boost, supported and distributed separately. See the Boost.CMake wiki page for more information.

# Ready?

Let's go!