# Erlang/OTP #otp_base_vsn#

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

## Some hints that may get you started faster

- The navigation menu can be accessed by clicking the
  symbol in the top left corner.
- The Erlang language is described in the Erlang Reference Manual. An Erlang tutorial can be found in Getting Started With Erlang.

  In addition to the documentation here Erlang is described in several recent books like:

  - "Introducing Erlang" from O'Reilly.
  - "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" from No Starch Press.
  - "Erlang Programming" from O'Reilly.
  - "Programming Erlang" from Pragmatic.
  - "Erlang and OTP in Action" from Manning.
  - "Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP" from O'Reilly.

  These books are highly recommended as a start for learning 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.

- 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.

  There are also Erlang plugins for other code editors Vim (vim-erlang) , Atom , Eclipse (ErlIDE) and IntelliJ IDEA.

- 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 and the Observer tool for inspection of system information, ets and mnesia tables etc.

  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.

- 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.

- Additional information and links of interest for Erlang programmers can be found on the Erlang Open Source site http://www.erlang.org.

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