diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
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+++ b/README.rst
@@ -1,6 +1,39 @@
 Pykaleidoscope
 ==============
 
+What is this?
+-------------
+
+LLVM comes with a `great tutorial <http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/>`_ that builds
+a compiler for a simple language called Kaleidoscope. The compiler parses
+Kaleidoscope into an AST, from which LLVM code is then generated using the LLVM
+IR building APIs. Once we have LLVM IR, it can be JITed to generate machine code
+and run it. In other words, convert your language into LLVM IR and leave the
+rest to LLVM itself (including world-class optimizations).
+
+The tutorial is presented in several "chapters" that start with a simple lexer
+and build up the language step by step.
+
+This repository contains a chapter-by-chapter translation of the LLVM tutorial
+into Python, using the `llvmlite <https://github.com/numba/llvmlite>`_ package
+that exposes LLVM to Python. For tips on setting up ``llvmlite`` with LLVM, `see
+this blog post
+<http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2015/building-and-using-llvmlite-a-basic-example/>`_.
+
+How to use this code
+--------------------
+
+Go through the `LLVM tutorial <http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/>`_. The files in
+this repository are named after tutorial chapters and roughly correspond to the
+C++ code presented in the tutorial. In each source file, the ``__main`` section
+of code in the bottom is a small sample of usage, and there are also unit tests
+that check a variety of cases.
+
+Version of LLVM, Python and llvmlite
+------------------------------------
+
+I tested with Python 3.4, LLVM 3.5 and top-of-tree ``llvmlite``.
+
 Testing
 -------