ACS Documentation

Table Of Contents


Introductory Documents

ACS Overview  - read this to get an idea of what is provided by ACS and how to use it.

ACS Installation Manual – this document provides detailed installation instructions. Lighter and shorter installation documentation is provided in the README file in the root directory of the distribution. This applies in particular to the LGPL distribution of ACS.

ACS Release Notes - always read this before any installation to see the latest changes. This document is kept in the ACS wiki and updated with each major and minor releases of ACS.

ACS Cookbook - this should be the first stop for ALMA software engineers wishing to learn how to use a specific ACS feature described in the ACS Architecture document. For any topic described in the ACS Cookbook, there will be a number of links referencing other ACS tutorials, manuals, etc. If a subject you would like explained and it is not in this document, please contact us so that we may add it.

ACS Roadmap - basic document designed to help new ALMA software developers understand exactly what ACS is and provides.

ALMA Software Development Tools and Integration Procedures - Every newcomer to ALMA and ACS should read this document.
This document, produced by the Integration and Testing team, gives an overview on the standards and tools that have been adopted and procedures and methodologies to be followed by the developers within the ALMA SW group.
The document provides information about: ACS Frequently Asked Questions - contains the answers to questions the ACS development team gets asked often.


Glossary, Abbreviations and Acronyms


Specification Documents

Specification and architecture documents for ACS describe the internal design of ACS and are probably not very interesting to the casual ACS user or developer. These documents are not written specifically for the current ACS release, but describe how ACS should and/or will be. In other words, only some of the features in these documents have already been implemented.


Automatically-generated API Documentation

In the links below you can find the APIs ACS provides for different releases.
Send us a email if you wish the API documentation of a specific release that is not included in the list below.

User Manuals

This section contains information and user manuals for the some ACS components and tools.


ACS Code Examples


Development tools

This section contain information about the documentation of development tools distributed with ACS. Such tools are mostly responsibility of the SE and I&T groups and their documentation is therefore not directly part of the ACS Documentation tree.


Very Large Telescope Software Documents

This section contains manuals and documentation for tools that, although part of the ESO VLT Common Software, are distributed as integral part of ACS in some distributions.

The complete documentation kit for the ESO VLT Common Software can be found at the following URL:

3rd Party Libraries


Other documents


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Modified on July 8, 2010