Java(TM) Developer's Guide to Eclipse, The (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: The one Eclipse book you should own
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Continues to be excellent reference for Eclipse developers
Review: The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse (JDG2E), 2nd edition,
is an updated version of the original popular
and very useful bible for Eclipse developers.
The first book to truly cover Eclipse 3.0 extensively
in both the usage of the IDE (how to use Eclipse) and in developing
plug-ins (how to extend Eclipse), it remains my "bible" in
developing Eclipse plug-ins. Many developer resources as extensive
as this one suffer from the "can't open it anywhere" syndrome.
I rarely have time to read a book from cover to cover at one (or adjacent)
setting. I like a book to use more as a reference, to look up what I want
to do and find a snippet of code, or an idea, to get me on my way.
This book is great in that respect - countless parts of my own plug-ins
have started from a code snippet found in one of the chapters.

The examples are simple enough to follow, in chunks that don't
require you to have read the whole book, but interesting enough
to show you some of the really useful intricacies of Eclipse.

The authors are experienced in training Java developers in Eclipse
plug-in development, and their experience shows in their practical
explanations, example code, and in the exercises included
on the CD in the back of the book.
I have so far only browsed the information on the CD but there
is much supplemental information there in additional to the provided
exercises.