The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse

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.

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.

Learning Eclipse, the open-source IDE and tool platform, can be adaunting task. While a plethora of on-line resources exist forlearning.... knowing where to start, andremembering what you've read, can be challenging. Finally a bookwith much of this in one place: The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse.As a long-time lover of books, expecially Java books, I find thatlearning from online resources on the web can be sufficient, butoften it's hard to know what you've read, where you stopped, where tofind something, etc. Especially when you're learning something verynew, or very complex, having it all in your hands can be comforting.(And you don't have to close the book during takeoff and landing.)Written by Eclipse experts with experience using *and teaching* otherdevelopers in its use, the chapters and exercises are well thoughtout. The authors are instructors with experience in teaching Eclipseto software developers, so have a good knowledge of Eclipse and howto present and explain it. This book contains three parts: Using Eclipse as an IDE forJava developement, Extending Eclipse with plug-ins, and exercisesfor all of the above. While a few other books are available on usingEclipse as an IDE, this is by far the most comprehensivebook on extending it by developing plug-ins.This book is unique in its thorough coverage of plug-ins (extendingEclipse: want a new popup menu? code reformatter? Write it yourself!) but don't overlook its good introduction to using theEclipse IDE itself for developing Java code, as well as a greatchapter on using CVS and the Eclipse interface to CVS code respository that is part of the standard download.The exercises on using Eclipse and building plug-ins are great, and often walking through the exercise(resources included on the CD with the book) reinforces or shedsadditional light on what is covered in a chapter. At times I jumped directly to the exercise after only briefly readingthe associated chapter information, and the hands-on learningaccomplished in this manner was great for this impatient Javadeveloper.I took the IBM class with the same name as the book, and foundthe exercises in the book similar, if less extensive than, thoseincluded with the course. But the basics are there, includingthe exercise that introduces action sets etc. that I referredto several times in my first plug-in development. A lot of mycode started with the exercise code and grew from there. As I workedthrough subsequent chapters and exercises, I came to a clearerunderstanding of what had been done in the previous code importedin the exercises, yet I was already up and running in terms ofdeveloping my plug-in.The book is written to Eclipse 2.0, with a few comments regardingchanges for version 2.1. While it would be nice to have the minor2.1 changes reflected in the book, I know the authors had to stopsomewhere to get published. This was the first Eclipse book published, I understand.Excellent, and highly recommended for all Java develop

I bought the book several weeks ago and have read the book cover to cover and tried all of the excercises. I just wanted to let everyone know how good this book is. Seriously, I've purchased and read nearly a hundred technical books in the past several years and this one stands out as one of the best I've ever read.Anybody who uses eclipse will get something out of this book, although as the title indicates it is primarily geared towards eclipse plugin developers. The first section is dedicated to eclipse users and illuminates many of the useful features that are built into eclipse. The second section of the book is where the real meat is at. This section covers everything you need to know to implement plugins. I was extremely impressed with just how much this book really covers. If you want your hand held for every step, this is not your book. It only presents code snippets, not fully coded examples for each concept. I think this is great, however, because the examples that are included (via the cd) do show full examples of the concepts without wasting valuable page real estate printing every last piece of code. Free of this baggage the book is able to cover considerable ground. If you want an idea of what this book is like go to eclipse.org and look at the articles. The book is like every article included on the website in much more detail, and covers many areas for which no articles have been written.The SWT tutorial and the examples were also very good. I have a few minor nitpicks: the book was written for eclipse 2.0. Many of the wizard menus shown in the book have changed with version 2.1 (and again I'm sure with 3.0), but if you have some intelligence its not hard to figure out how to follow the examples in 2.1. Secondly I'd like a small section dedicated to getting information from existing views. I often need check information in one view in order to instantiate the model behind another view. The twists and turns of the extensive Eclipse API can make doing this not very intuitive. I've read the Resources section over and over, but I still haven't found the information I need. I eventually figured out some methods that worked after reading a lot of API documentation.Those are just minor nitpicks, however. Overall I have to say this book is GREAT!! If your are an application builder (especially if you build tools), the power of the eclipse architecture will blow you away. I build tools for a data warehouse and eclipse has transformed my tools from quick-and-dirty tools designed for our specific needs, to near commercial ready plugins.I can't stress this enough, Eclipse is a BIG deal. Its much more than an IDE. Do yourself a favor and buy this book, you won't regret it.Michael CrutcherTexas A & M University

You've downloaded Eclipse. You've coded with the Java IDE. You've loved the refactoring and incremental compilation. Now you have an idea for a new cool plug-in that you think everyone will love.If this describes you, you need this book.I've been developing Eclipse plug-ins commercially for over a year. Previously, I had to teach myself by reading and/or searching:1) Articles on Eclipse.org2) The online help3) The newsgroup4) The source code to Eclipse itself--not necessarily in that order.Now I just turn to this book. It almost always answers my questions quickly and succinctly. Even with over a year of Eclipse background gained by teaching myself, I continually feel amazed at how quickly and how much this book has increased the depth of my understanding about how to write Eclipse plug-ins.It is obvious when reading this book that (as professional teachers/trainers) the authors of this book have already taught this information many times and know what tends to trip people up. Their writing style flows with the ease of great familiarity with and confidence about their material. And their code examples work.