Some hints that may get you started faster

• In addition the the documentation here Erlang is described in the book "Programming Erlang", ISBN 978-1-934356-00-5 which we really recommend as a start.
  The complete language is also described 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.

  There is also an Erlang plugin (ErlIde) for Eclipse if you prefer a more graphical environment. ErlIde is under development and should at the time of writing this be quite stable and useful.

• 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), inline 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.