Welcome to From The Ground Up: A Guide to C++. We hope that this tutorial is different from any other learning experience you've ever had. How many times have you skipped through parts of a book, only to have the parts you missed come back to haunt you when you find out you didn't learn them? This tutorial will know when you skip ahead, and it will try to adapt what it does to make sure you don't miss out.

For this reason, remember to save your username and password! By using your personalized account, you can start where you left off, and the tutorial can adapt itself each time to your style of learning.

This tutorial is targeted primarily at people who already have a decent knowledge of Pascal, a simple language designed to teach computer programming concepts. Pascal, although originally thought to be a stepping stone to languages used in commercial programming, such as C and C++ (the object-oriented version of C), is no longer that much easier to learn, and so it is being phased out of many computer science curriculums. Many organizations, most importantly The College Board , makers of the "AP Tests" most high school students take, are starting to use C++ in its place on their exams. That's where we come in.

We're going to go over everything you'll need to transfer all of your skills in Pascal (or any similar language -- while this tutorial was designed with Pascal programmers in mind, it is possible to get the gist of things) right over to C++. We want this to be fun for you, so the tutorial will be filled with light humor; we know that it's really easy to get distracted on the web, so whatever we have to do to keep your attention, we're going to do.

To go on in the tutorial, follow the "Forward" link (a nacho if you have a graphical browser).