### 2.1.6 How Do I Begin?

POV-Ray scenes are described in a special text language called a "scene description language". You will type commands into a plain text file and POV-Ray will read it to create the image. The process of running POV-Ray is a little different on each platform or operating system. You should read the platform-specific documentation as suggested earlier in this introduction. It will tell you how to command POV-Ray to turn your text scene description into an image. You should try rendering several sample images before attempting to create your own.

Once you know how to run POV-Ray on your computer and your operating system, you can proceed with the tutorial which follows. The tutorial explains how to describe the scene using the POV-Ray language.