Eclipse

Outstanding book, right to the point on installation, configuration, adding plugins and integration of other products like tortoise or CVS. I highly recommend. Check the version you are or will be running and which version the book covers.

I'm the type of guy who, until I read this book, used a text editor and the command line for all of my coding. I had never gotten to really know an IDE because of the documentation. Either the examples were too simple to hold my attention, or I gave up after not understanding what was going on. However, Steve Holzner's "Eclipse" was right on the money. The book flowed very well. Its pace seemed to be tailored to me. The book begins with the essentials of Eclipse. I really liked how the author explained what each component was before I actually ran the program and was bombarded with windows. Next the reader is taken on a guided journey though creating an Eclipse project. The goal was to make the classic "Hello, World!" program using Eclipse. Wonderful features were introduced in a logical, well thought out order that made writing the "Hello, World!" program seem exciting. The book also shows how to deal with typos and mistakes. The essential skills that followed are very useful in the day to day use of Eclipse. The debugging chapter was nice too. The reader is given a short program with a subtle bug in it. The reader is guided though the debugging process. There are many screen shots and code listings that make this chapter especially easy to follow along with. I found the chapter on web development interesting too. It went through all of the steps required to code, test, debug and deploy java servlets and java beans. It was very indepth and included some good example code as well. This review isn't all praise, there was one part of the book that I thought it could do without. I think that it could do without some of the sections on graphical user interfaces. The GUI programming chapter had some useful information about a plug-in for Eclipse that allows for visual GUI design, but it is preceded by 10 pages about using the AWT and swing. The book should be more about using Eclipse and less about using Java. The book also devotes a lot of paper to using the SWT. I really enjoyed reading this book. The writing style of the author was superb. I was never bored or lost while I was reading it. It definitely gave me the skills to effectively use Eclipse. The book also goes into areas of java that someone who has taken only one or two courses in Java would enjoy learning about such as debugging, GUI design, and web applications. I would recommend this book to anyone with at least 6 months of java experience.

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.

I was just dropped into a position where I'm using Eclipse, Java, and Tomcat, and this book is PERFECT. (I very rarely buy computer books because, frankly, most of the info is online, but I'm glad I bought this one.) I have used Java a great deal, but never Eclipse or Tomcat, and this book got me up to speed very quickly. It was exactly what I needed. It also has a good chapter on Ant (which is a "make" replacement) and a great chapter introducing Struts development. With this book I also learned how I can control the Tomcat server right from within Eclipse using a free plugin for Eclipse. If you're in a similar situation where you have a job where you need to learn Eclipse quickly, then this book is for you. I highly recommend it.

I have been working with Eclipse and its derivatives (e.g., IBM/Rational's XDE for Java) for over a year now. The most significant reality about Eclipse for a user is its long learning curve. There is so much in Eclipse, and just knowing what you can configure is a challenge. When I read Holzner's book last month, from the first chapter I kept bemoaning, "Why didn't I have this book a year ago?" I can recommend this book without reservation for anyone moving to Eclipse as a Java development environment. Many recent books focus specifically on writing plug-ins for Eclipse. Holzner covers writing a simple plug-in, but what he has written is a book for developers who want to use Eclipse to write and test real Java applications.Holzner's style is to cover a lot of ground without getting tediously deep into any single subject area. This is one reason his writing is so readable. In this book he has a very nice introduction to using the JUnit perspective for automated unit testing, a concise introduction to the debug perspective, a chapter on Ant for building projects, and integrating Eclipse with the CVS software repository.Holzner spends several chapters on GUI and web development, but don't look for detailed information on how to do Swing, or JSPs. Holzner's focus is on how Eclipse supports development in these areas. He has a chapter on Swing GUI application development, two chapters on SWT (IBM's Standard Widget Toolkit) development, and a very accessible chapter on using Eclipse for web development with JSPs, servlets, javabeans, and how to use the Sysdeo Tomcat plug-in to simplify your life. I was not aware of this plug-in until I read this book, and knowing about it was almost worth the price of the book. The chapter on Struts development was the least clear to me, only because I have not worked with Struts, but if you understand the Model-View-Controller architecture you will be able to get a good understanding in this chapter of what Struts is trying to provide, and how Eclipse will support you.Holzner offers two chapters on developing plug-ins, and I am impressed that he could convey so much in just two chapters. Plug-in development can be very complex, but Holzner presents the basic requirements very cogently. He closes out the book with a pro-spective on Eclipse 3.0, now finally available at eclipse.org. It was a fun, quick read, and even after more than a year of using Eclipse I learned some really nice things from this book.