The biggest problem for me, with Erlang, is that there just aren't a lot of great sources for documentation. There are even less (obvious) resources for learning the language from scratch. This new chapter helps a lot with both.
This was one of the reasons for me to write Learn You Some Erlang in the first place. All good information to learn the language had to be taken from books (which cost money, although there are very good books out there) or training courses (which cost even more money, but are a pretty good way to do things, especially for teams).
Most of the stuff on the official website is either rather short in content, or made as reference manual rather than a tutorial. I was hoping that LYSE would become the de-facto free learning guide out there for Erlang. And not just for the syntax and modules, but also for the general ideas of the languages, de-facto standards in the community, etc.
There is a lot of documentation of Erlang/OTP in the standard distribution and on the erlang.org site, both describing the various libraries and the philosophy behind OTP. Though I will freely admit that some of it can be difficult to find, especially in the beginning. And release handling and upgrades have been a bit of black magic, though that has improved now.
Two excellent books (O'Reilly, PragProg) and this site are great for beginners. The standard docs are very good once you are comfortable with the language. Great mailing list. I don't agree with your comment.
There are certainly resources out there to learn Erlang. I found it difficult to find those resources, it's possible that was due to user error (me). There wasn't anything immediately obvious that was the "best" way to get started, especially without committing to buying a book that might not be what I wanted.
Other languages do a much better job (IMHO) of helping you get your feet wet before committing further. If you want to learn javascript, you watch the Crockford videos. After a couple hours, you have a pretty good idea of what it's all about and if you want to spend more time learning it. Erlang didn't seem as accessible to me. That's not to say that there aren't resources available. They just aren't as immediately obvious as they could be.
However I found that 3rd party libraries often aren't very well documented. I found myself having to read the source more often that with other languages. Luckily though, Erlang is much easier to understand than those other languages.
