Throughout the ages, tutorials have always used the phrase "Hello, World!" to signify the first example program. Keeping with tradition, we'll be showing you how to print out lines, starting with the above, during the course of this chapter.

We cannot, unfortunately, help you learn how to read in characters in this chapter -- while our Java C++ tools are nice, they do not have the ability to open up a live session to the C++ compiler, they only spit out its results. We hope to someday expand the tutorial to things like this; in the mean time, please use a C++ compiler of your own, if you have one. If you don't, you should think about purchasing one, as you really can get a lot more out of C++ if you can make your own programs that you can give out to others.

For similar reasons, we can't also help you learn file access. Our C++ compiler runs in a special fashion to make sure you can't blow up a computer when you're running buggy programs;think of it as putting a raging bull in a padded room and letting him bounce around. We have others to consider on the system we use, so we can't allow you to create or read files. Sorry.

However, most of the concepts there are really very simple, and should be almost identical to the concepts you'll learn for printing out text. We will offer (through the "more info" icons) the tutorials on how to do file access and how to read in characters, however, to curious minds. Please, do not try running those programs in our Java editor -- it won't work.

Now that we've gotten those ground rules down, let's get going.