Help with site's tutorial on constants

[CaptainLinux94]

Here's the link for it:
http://cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/constants.html

Near the beginning of the tutorial, it starts going into octal (8-base) and hexadecimal (?-base) numbers.

Being a person with little to no experience with these sorts of numbers, would someone like to explain how they work and the significance of them in C++?

[VenomousNinja]

Both of those, if I'm right, are important to C++ simply because they can tell the computer large numbers without taking up a large amount of characters.

Say for example, I wanted to tell the computer the number '16', it's a small number I know, but it'll work for now, anyway, you can put
0x1 //Use the '0x' to tell the computer that is a hexadecimal number
, and the computer will know that it's sixteen.
Now sixteen is a relatively small number, but this can work for larger numbers, almost any number past sixteen if I'm correct.

If I'm at all incorrect on this, please correct me.

[z05DSL3A]

Octal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octal

Hexadecimal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal

[firedraco]

Uh, and also, 0x1 is 1 in decimal...You are thinking of 0xF which is 16 in decimal.

[z05DSL3A]

Q. How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?

A. 57006