What does the 'L' in front a string mean in C++?

It's a wchar_t literal, for extended character set. Wikipedia has a little discussion on this topic, and c++ examples.

'L' means wchar_t, which, as opposed to a normal character, requires 16-bits of storage rather than 8-bits. Here's an example:

"A"    = 41
"ABC"  = 41 42 43
L"A"   = 00 41
L"ABC" = 00 41 00 42 00 43

A wchar_t is twice big as a simple char. In daily use you don't need to use wchar_t, but if you are using windows.h you are going to need it.