Welcome to the ATLAS Software Documentation pages.

Here you can find tutorials and guides written and reviewed by experts.

New to ATLAS?
Have you just joined ATLAS and want to know more about the software? These links will help you to get started: If you would like some more general introductions to software development for research, take a look at the High Energy Physics Software Foundation training pages.
Need help getting started with physics analysis software?
Follow the complete Analysis Software Tutorial, or jump directly to the introduction of the Common CP Algorithms
Or are you here to analyse the ATLAS open data?
If so, start here
Starting work on ATLAS software?
Are you beginning an ATLAS software task? Read the introductory links above and then:
Experienced developer?
These links may be helpful:
Questions or problems?
Look at the Asking Questions page for guidance on where to post a question, or see the Issue Reporting page.

These pages contained structured software documentation, and exist in addition to the twiki [ATLAS members only], and are intended to be more authoritative.

For comments and suggestions, please feel free to use the issue tracker.

If you want to update or modify the content yourself, please feel free to follow the contribution guide.

Tutorials vs Guides vs Manuals

The following pages include tutorials, guides and manuals here are some definitions to help you distinguish between these three types of documentation:

  • A Tutorial is a set of step-by-step instructions (exercises, try-this-try-that, etc). A tutorial can also be a sub-section of a guide.
  • Guides are more conceptual description of how things work.
  • Manuals are detailed descriptions of every command-line option for a utility or every function in a module etc.