dual boot?

[Charlie England]

Please forgive the total neophyte question.

I'd like to get my feet wet using ubuntu on a dual boot system with Win 
XP. The wording of the help files leaves me with nagging fear that even 
with partitioning, I might not preserve the windows functionality.  If I 
follow the instructions at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HowtoPartition?highlight=%28CategoryDocumentation%29 


& accept defaults after that, does the install process preserve the 
Windows partition & allow dual boot?

Thanks,

Charlie