The goal of this introduction is to explain to you how you can write and run a minimal analysis task for the AliPhysics analysis framework. This task will not give you any real 'physics' results, it's just a minimal example of what you need know to do a data analysis for the ALICE experiment. It is assumed that you have basic knowledge of both C++ and ROOT.
At the end of this introduction, you will understand what happens in your analysis task, and you will understand how to run it on your laptop, on the Grid, and in 'LEGO-trains'. What all of this means will become clear later on. After you have read this introduction, you can follow steps 1 through 7 of the Analysis tutorial exercises, which will give you hands-on experience with building an analysis from the grounds up, and running it. This of course requires that you have a working version of the ALICE software stack available on your computer.