Rating: 
Summary: The only available resource
Review: This book is the only available book on NetBeans I have so far found. All in all, this book is the best resource I have found on the subject. The book really helped me start developing with NetBeans. Thanks to the authors for a great work.< I read mostly the second part of the book, "Extending NetBeans".I wish the book could provide more examples. I found the "English" text somehow difficult to follow. In addition, the text does not always directly point to the examples provided. If you want to start developing with NetBeans, you should start here!
Rating:
Summary: A complete and worthwhile reference
Review: This is mostly a well-written, dense, book about a very complex subject. I learn something new each time I pick up the book meaning this is a book that you will want to keep nearby. Many of the reviewers lamented the second half of the book about creating your own plug-in. Since that was the sole purpose for me to obtain the book, I welcomed the wealth of information. I was also impressed that it covered branding, which is precisely the information I was looking for. In a the short time it took for me to read a few chapters, I had written, branded, and packaged the initial skeleton of the application I'm building on top of the NetBeans platform. The organization of the opening Concepts and Paradigms chapter baffled me. It's also a tutorial and user guide and overview. The section didn't flow together very well unlike the more focused chapters that came later. The only major complaint I would have is that many of the examples and code didn't work in my version (3.6). But that can't be blamed on the book which was based upon version 3.3. The solution was usually easily found. The O'Reilly errata pages also provided some fixes. I expect everything else will be cleared up by the NetBeans community on their fairly active mailing lists. I also found the chapter on creating beans to be a bit light on motivation. Why would I want to create a bean? What is a bean and how do the steps presented create a bean? How would the bean be used? I would have also liked to have seen how to make the editor use Emacs keybindings. While that capability does not exist in the product at present, I'm sure there are enough people who want that capability that it would have been useful to describe a workaround in the book. I caught nearly a half dozen typographical and grammatical errors and one error in an example. More than I'd expect from O'Reilly. Since NetBeans is evolving so quickly, I'd encourage O'Reilly to come out with editions that cover 3.6 and the upcoming 4.0. No matter, if you're going to use NetBeans, you have to read this book.
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