# Introduction

This library is designed to make it easy to write games that run on Linux, Win32 and BeOS using the various native high-performance media interfaces, (for video, audio, etc) and presenting a single source-code level API to your application. This is a fairly low level API, but using this, completely portable applications can be written with a great deal of flexibility.

The library is loaded as a dynamically linked library on its native platform, and is currently compiled natively for Linux, compiled for Win32 using a Linux hosted GCC cross-compilation environment, and compiled using the EGCS C++ compiler under BeOS.

An introduction to SDL can be found online at: http://www.libsdl.org/intro/

There are code examples on each of the main library pages, and there are fully fleshed example C++ classes and programs in the examples archive, available on the SDL download page.

For an introduction to basic multi-media programming concepts, you might try some of the following links:

- Game Programming Links

- Game Developer Search Engine

Enjoy!

Sam Lantinga `<slouken@libsdl.org>`

# Table of Contents

- Full Table of Contents
- The SDL Guide
- The SDL Reference

- Initialization
- Video
- Window Manager
- Event Handling
- Joystick
- Audio
- CDROM
- Threads
- Timers