Reviews for The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse

1. Excellent guide to Eclipse

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2008

   This book is very well written, complete, clear. It includes a first part about how to use the Eclipse IDE (you could find that out from the Help in Eclipse, but this is much clearer and structured), and a second part about writing your own plug ins. There are plenty of examples, and some very useful exercises. If you've never worked with Eclipse, this is the book for you. If you already used it a bit, I'll bet you'll find plenty of new tricks and features explained here that you had never seen or understood before.

2. The one Eclipse book you should own

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12st, 2005

   The first edition of this book was excellent for plug-in developers and helpful, although not vital, to all others. Two things make this new edition even better than the first edition. First, plug-in development in Eclipse is now so easy and so well explained in this book that there is no reason why anyone shouldn't be doing it. Have you ever worked with an IDE and thought, "why isn't this function available in the pop-up menu" or "why doesn't it have this feature"? Developing a plug-in will allow you to customize the functionality of Eclipse to provide the missing feature and this book will clearly explain exactly how to do that. Second, the section of the book that deals with developing with Eclipse has been improved with detailed chapters on team development including using CVS as well as an excellent example of integrating with Tomcat to develop an E-Commerce application.

   The book is divided into two sections. The first 200 pages deal with using Eclipse and cover everything from the basics to complex team development issues. The next 600 pages cover everything you need to know about extending the functionality of Eclipse. The book ends with 200 pages of exercises that give detailed, step-by-step examples. Five exercises deal with using Eclipse while the rest show examples of extending Eclipse. It is a big book that covers a lot of material but it covers it clearly and with plenty of examples. If you buy one Eclipse book, this should be it.

3. Excellent for those writing plug-ins

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2003

   The authors of this book are part of a core IBM group formed to share knowledge of the Eclipse universal IDE. The first part of this book deals with using Eclipse from a Java developers point of view. I found this was not any more helpful than the documentation available on the Eclipse web site. Eclipse works extensively with plug-ins that can be integrated into the Eclipse environment to provide new functionality. I would have liked to see something on some of the more popular plug-ins such as those used to run application servers. Even a list of where to go to get plug-ins would have been helpful. Unfortunately, this part of the book only covers the basics of what comes with Eclipse and does not discuss any existing plug-ins.

   The second part of the book, about 450 pages, covers writing your own plug-ins. This part of the book is excellent. It covers not just the basics, but virtually everything you need to know to write your own plug-ins. Whether you wish to code a new toolbar, editor, specialized view, or wizard, it is all covered in this section. With this book you will be writing plug-ins in a fraction of the time you would have otherwise spent. The book also contains exercises which allow you to test your new knowledge.

   If your only goal is to use Eclipse then you don't need this book. If your desire is to write plug-ins then I wouldn't even try without it.