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:
Enjoy!
Sam Lantinga <slouken@libsdl.org>