First of all, you can change the page counter at any point to the number you want like this:
\setcounter{page}{3} % Set the page counter to 3
following pages will continue from there.
As to starting the numbers from chapter 1, a good practice is to have alphabetical or roman numbering for things before the main text (also called frontmatter; such as table of contents, list of tables and etc.) and switch to normal numbering at the beginning of the main chapters (also called mainmatter). Numbering style can be set with the following command which also resets the page counter to 1:
\pagenumbering{alph} % set the numbering style to lowercase letter
style can be any of these:
- arabic: arabic numerals
- roman: lowercase roman numerals
- Roman: uppercase roman numerals
- alph: lowercase letters
- Alph: uppercase letters
Sample code:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\pagenumbering{roman} % Start roman numbering
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\pagenumbering{arabic} % Switch to normal numbers
\chapter{First Chapter}
Contents of chapter 1
\end{document}
In the book documents you can also use these commands to achieve the same thing:
\frontmatter % The pages after this command and before the command \mainmatter, will be numbered with lowercase Roman numerals.
\mainmatter % This will restart the page counter and change the style to Arabic numbers
Source: https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/Page_numbering
\mainmatter
resets the page numbering to arabic and the number to 1.