From Erlang Community

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Preface

The Erlang Cookbook is designed to be a good starting point for learning about the language, the OTP platform, and fault tolerant programming. This book was started as a way for me to document what I learned about the Erlang programming language, best practices gleaned from reading the newsgroups and mailing lists, and tips and tricks from the helpful developers and scientists using Erlang.

I modeled this book on the nearly-completed Scheme Cookbook that I was fortunate enough to have been part of developing.

This book (and the Scheme Cookbook itself) could not have been created without the excellent templating system Anton van Straaten developed for the Scheme Cookbook. As for this latest edition, it could not exist without the excellent MediaWiki software.

Introduction

The Erlang Cookbook's primary aim is to document short "recipes", using Erlang, that solve common programming problems. Parts of the Cookbook are specific to OTP Erlang but we aim to provide portable solutions when possible.

A secondary aim of the Cookbook is to further the adoption of Erlang. To that end we want to allow the possibility of a publishable book. The Copyright statement for this book is the most important consideration for publication. It is designed to allow free access to the content of the Cookbook while protecting the investment a publisher may make in a compilation of material from the Cookbook. If you are going to contribute to the Cookbook you must agree to the CopyRight statement.

The Cookbook is a collaborative document and contributions are actively sought from all users of Erlang. See the AuthorGuide for instructions on how you can contribute.

Copyright

Information moved from the Erlang Cookbook on schemecookbook.org is licensed LGPL (see the copyright)

Adding Recipes

A simple way to create a new Wiki page is to edit a URL to the title of the new page.

For instance, for a new page called 'Creating Palindromes' you can simply browse to a new URL that looks like this:

http://wiki.trapexit.org/index.php/Creating_Palindromes

Adding New Article To CookBook Category

At the moment the only core thing for creating a new recipe is to add the new article in to the CookBook category.

This is done by adding the line to the end of the recipe

[[Category:CookBook]]

This will then automatically add the article to the category.

Recipe Style

You should divide the recipe into two main areas. The first area should be a 'Problem' area where you describe the problem you are trying to solve. The second area should be a 'Solutions' area where you describe the solution to the aforementioned problem.

Embedding Erlang Code

Erlang code can be embedded in pages using the

<code></code> tags.

The code tag can take a 'caption' attribute which will cause a caption to be displayed for the snippet. It is a good idea to use the code tags rather than try and format code samples yourself since future extensions to the Wiki will include syntax highlighting for appropriately marked up code.

Example

<code caption="Code Snippet 1">

loop() ->
  loop().

</code>

Becomes:

loop() ->
  loop().

Attribution

You should provide any attributions or authorship information in the 'Talk' tab of the recipe you are creating.