Erlang/OTP R11B Documentation

Welcome to Erlang/OTP, a complete
development environment
for concurrent programming.

Some hints that may get you started faster

- The Erlang programming language is described in the book Concurrent Programming in Erlang, ISBN 0-13-285792-8, 2nd edition. The first part of the book is available as a PDF document. However, the language has evolved since the book was written, and a more up to date description can be found in the Erlang Reference Manual. An Erlang tutorial can be found in Getting Started With Erlang.

- Erlang/OTP is divided into a number of OTP applications. An application normally contains Erlang modules. Some OTP applications, such as the C interface Erl_Interface, are written in other languages and have no Erlang modules.

  Note that functions that are not imported or prefixed with a module name belong to the module erlang (in the Kernel application).

- On a Unix system you can view the manual pages from the command line using

          % erl -man <module>

- You can of course use any editor you like to write Erlang programs, but if you use Emacs there exists editing support such as indentation, syntax highlighting, electric commands, module name verification, comment support including paragraph filling, skeletons, tags support and more. See the Tools application for details.

- When developing with Erlang/OTP you usually test your programs from the interactive shell (see Getting Started With Erlang) where you can call individual functions. There is also a number of tools available, such as the graphical Debugger, the process manager Pman and table viewer TV.

  Also note that there are some shell features like history list (control-p and control-n), in line editing (emacs key bindings) and module and function name completion (tab) if the module is loaded.

- There are some suggestions for best practice and performance hints using Erlang/OTP.

- If you are a paying customer you can get support and request bug fixes from <support@erlang.se>. OpenSource users can ask questions and share experiences on the Erlang questions mailing list.

- Before asking a question you can browse the mailing list archive and read the Frequently Asked Questions.

- There is lots more information at http://www.erlang.se and http://www.erlang.org.