Please Help!! im new at programming therefore im new at C++. So i bought a book which is working great except for this problem. U see i bought the Beginning C++ Game Programming book by Michael Dawson. And im using the Dev-C++ software that came with it. i was working on one of the excercises in the book and when i compiled and ran the program it worked fine. But this was an excercise that i was supposed to hit enter to have the program stay stuff back.And i press enter and the program runs so quickly that it brings me back to my code. Im on page 45 doing the menu chooser program if anyone has the book. He is using Microsoft Visual Studio and i was wondering if maybe instead i should be using that instead of Dev C++. Anyway heres the code im working on. // Menu Chooser // Demonstrates the switch statement #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { cout << "Difficulty Levelsn\n\n"; cout << "1 - Easy\n"; cout << "2 - Normal\n"; cout << "3 - Hard\n"; int choice; cout << "Choice: "; cin >> choice; switch (choice) { case 1: cout << "You picked Easy.\n"; break; case 2: cout << "You picked Normal.\n"; break; case 3: cout << "You picked Hard.\n"; break; default: cout << "You made an illegal choice.\n"; } return 0; } if u could answer my questions that would be great

Add a system("PAUSE"); call before return 0.

im really new at this so if you could give me the exact way to write it in my source file so i can practice with it that would be great

It's simply a system call that waits (or "pauses") until you press "any key." Otherwise the code will return before you have a chance to see it.

Yea, that works too. (And is probably better practice since it's system independent).

I second MinGW DS. Great IDE.

Or if you run the program from the dos prompt, it won't dissapear when it finishes running.

You mean cmd.exe, right? Unless he's using 95/98 there is no DOS prompt.