A boundary layer problem on heat transfer in a viscoelastic boundary layer fluid flow over a non-isothermal porous sheet, where the flow is generated due to linear stretching of the sheet and influenced by a continuous suction/blowing of the fluid through the porous boundary, has been presented. In the flow region, heat balance is maintained with a temperature dependent heat source/sink, viscous dissipation and thermal radiation. Applying suitable similarity transformations on the highly non-linear momentum boundary layer equation and thermal boundary layer equation several closed from analytical solutions have been derived for non-dimensional temperature and heat flux profiles in the from of confluent hyper geometric (Kummer's) functions and other elementary functions as its special form. Heat transfer analysis has been carried out for two general types of boundary heating processes, namely, (i) prescribed quadratic power law surface temperature (PST) and (ii) prescribed quadratic power law surface heat flux (PHF) for various values of non-dimensional viscoelastic parameter k(1)(+), Prandtl number Pr, Eckert number E, radiation parameter N, suction/blowing parameter v(w) and source/ sink parameter beta. Some of the several important findings reported in this paper are (i) the combined effect of Prandtl number Pr, radiation parameter N and suction/blowing parameter v, has significant impact in controlling the rate of heat transfer to the boundary layer region through the porous stretching sheet and (ii) radiation and suction can be used as means of cooling the viscoelastic boundary layer flow region. Special cases of our results are in excellent agreement with some of the existing work. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.