Rating: 
Summary: Covers Basic Fuctions
Review: The book does have lots of graphics as referred to by other reviewers but they are appropriate and explain the text. "One picture is worth a 1000 words". Common development tasks are covered in enough detail to help beginners and those new to an IDE. Not everyone likes to read the online help to learn how to use software while most of us will search for a specific topic. This book satisfies the need for a clear understandable how to manual of the basic functionality. Just think of it as the printed user manual for those who like to have a paper reference. The only criticism is that the cover reference to coverage of 3.0 is misleading because it is discussed in only 18 pages out of 295.
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction
Review: The first couple of chapters provide a nice quick start. Although I've been using Eclipse for several months, I still learned quite a few new things here.
Eclipse's JUnit integration is awesome and the chapter about it was equally good. I had no idea that Eclipse had such capabilities.
The CVS integration chapter is OK, but I still don't fully understand the Synchronize functionality. More detail is needed.
Similarly, the chapter on Ant is a bit light. It doesn't talk about how one can modify build.xml outside of the editor like in the Outline view. Maybe Eclipse doesn't have that functionality, but then that fact should be mentioned.
The sections on applets and AWT, as well as Swing, could have been eliminated since there aren't any Eclipse helpers described. I was happy to see that there is a Swing GUI builder available (V4ALL), but the coverage isn't deep enough. The V4ALL-generated code fragments contained cryptic "user code" comments which are not described.
If you intend to use SWT (instead of Swing), the chapters on SWT are good.
The chapters on servlet, JSP coding and debugging, war deployment, and Struts introduced available plug-ins have just enough to get you started but it seems that there may be a lot more issues lurking below the covers. The Struts chapter should have started with the Easy Struts plug-in since one of the major features of Eclipse is its code templates. That would have eliminated the duplication of code fragments in this chapter. As one of the reviewers noted, this is *not* a book on Struts programming.
The chapters on writing plug-ins seemed adequate.
Things I would have liked to have seen in the chapter on 3.0: source formatting, import organization, key bindings, doing everything without a mouse, hovers.
Finally, I care a lot about coding style. Books on XP say that a given codebase should like it was written by one person, and my experience has been that code written with this view is much easier to read, maintain, and use if this is the case. Sun has published a style guide, and Eclipse's default code formatting rules follow these guidelines, so I would have liked to have seen the book set a good example and use them as well (I'd also like to see all publishers of Java books make the Sun coding conventions part of their style guides). For example, the opening brace style varied throughout the book. Putting the opening brace on its own line would have made for a good example of how the code formatting function works, but the rest of the examples should have used the style of putting the brace on the end of the line that begins the compound statement. Furthermore, some class names had underscores.
Despite the nits, I learned a lot from this book and would recommend it. A new edition written for version 3.1 which resolves the issues I raised would be most welcome!
Rating: 
Summary: Great intro to Eclipse
Review: This book will walk you through everything needed to rapidly start development using the Eclipse IDE. The author covers everything including basic IDE usage, debugging, CVS, Ant, graphical programming, and web programming. After reading this text, you should be able to do just about anything with Eclipse. The book is well written, easy to follow, and is jammed full of illustrations and sample code. Well done Mr Holzner.
Rating:
Summary: The Monopoly on Eclilpse
Review: This is a great book about Eclipse. I do all my Java development with Eclipse. I am a convert from the Netbeans IDE. This IDE is more powerful than Netbeans. Particularly because of the massive amount of plug-ins. This book goes into a lot of that. But I want more and wish I could find it. I am tired of all the IDE's that I use for multiple application development. It would be nice to have one that would work for all apps. I downloaded the CDT plug-in. My C programs look great in Eclipse from Visual Studio .Net. However, I am having a horrible time trying to connect a C/C++ compiler to Eclipse. I can edit right now but not compile. I also use ColdFusion. There is a plug-in for that. It looks great as well. I guess more books need to be written. If you are just doing Java development then this is a must.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Want to get up and running with Eclipse? This is your book. Informal style, packed with information. Recommended.
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