Welcome to the complete C++ Developer Course. I'm your instructor, John Baugh. I have a PhD in computer science. I'm a professional software engineer and consultant and computer science professor and department chair at my primary academic institution. My students usually just call me "Dr. J." In this getting started section, we will just go over some of the basics and get you set up with some basic information and the right software to make your journey learning C++ a little bit easier. As far as terminology is concerned, one term I use quite a bit throughout the course is IDE, which stands for integrated development environment. An IDE consists of a bunch of tools that helps us to write and run our code. One of the most important components invoked by the IDE is the compiler, which is a program that converts the programming language, in our case C++, into machine code which consists of the zeros and ones that the computer can understand. We will write C++ code and then build it, part of which is compiling, which does the conversion from C++ to the machine code. The IDE I will use throughout the course is Visual Studio, and I will be running it and demonstrating code examples on Windows. If you aren't on Windows then don't worry. There is a lecture in this section about what to do if you're on MacOS or Linux. And even though my user interface in Visual Studio might be different from the software you use on another platform or even Windows itself, most of the steps are similar. And as far as the C++ code is concerned, everything should be the same. So, go to the lecture for your platform coming up in this section, the Windows with Visual Studio lecture or the MacOS or Linux with Code Blocks lecture and follow along to get set up and running. This is going to be an exciting course, and I'm so glad to have you along for this journey. Let's get going.