I am a newbie to erlang.

When I heard of CEAN, I kind of knew what it was, but there was no place which said:

CEAN is a Erlang module that must be installed into a Erlang system before it will work.

Once it is installed, issuing the command cean:help() from a erl shell. will show which functions are made available by the cean module.

As an example:

cean:help().
The functions are: [available,
depends,
display,
help,
install,
installed,
etc....]

I finally figured out that I had to be in a erl shell before I could use cean.  The tip-off was “cean:help().” which I recognized as being a erl command to use the cean module and execute the help function.

I would suggest that this information should be made very prominent to help new users of erlang to get up and running.

that’s a good point.

cean is an erang module that must be installed into an erlang system to use packages.
but cean also provide bare minimal “cean ready” erlang system. you do not need to install 40M of erlang to use erlang
cean/erlang base is a 3M archive.

yes, cean functions like help MUST be used inside an erl shell.
do you mean cean:help(<function>) should be more detailed ?