LPD8806 RGB LED Strip - Reverse Engineer (with pics) questions/feedback

This may be silly, but I am trying to understand how the LED (or "pixels") are identified , ie how do I know number one is the first or so. As per the library it seems to be the pixels are handled by an array and the show function just send the color info via the SPI . I am not familiar with CPP syntax (I play mostly AVR in C), but is pixels[0] the first LED ? if so how the controller knows?

Thanks for any info or direction on on this and my apologies if this is indeed silly and I must look better in the code.
Jose