Product Description
"Fully updated and revised for Eclipse 3.0, this book is the definitive Eclipse reference--an indispensable guide for tool builders, rich client application developers, and anyone customizing or extending the Eclipse environment." --Dave Thomson, Eclipse Project Program Director, IBM The Ultimate Guide to Eclipse 3.0 for the Java Developer. No Eclipse Experience Required! Eclipse is a world-class Java integrated development environment (IDE) and an open source project and community. Written by members of the IBM Eclipse Jumpstart team, The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse, Second Edition, is the definitive Eclipse companion. As in the best-selling first edition, the authors draw on their considerable experience teaching Eclipse and mentoring developers to provide guidance on how to customize Eclipse for increased productivity and efficiency. In this greatly expanded edition, readers will find *A total update, including the first edition's hallmark, proven exercises--all revised to reflect Eclipse 3.0 changes to the APIs, plug-ins, UI, widgets, and more *A special focus on rich client support with a new chapter and two exercises *A comprehensive exercise on using Eclipse to develop a Web commerce application using Apache's Tomcat *A new chapter on JFace viewers and added coverage of views *A new chapter on internationalization and accessibility *New chapters on performance tuning and Swing interoperability Using this book, those new to Eclipse will become proficient with it, while advanced developers will learn how to extend Eclipse and build their own Eclipse-based tools. The accompanying CD-ROM contains Eclipse 3.0, as well as exercise solutions and many code examples. Whether you want to use Eclipse and Eclipse-based offerings as your integrated development environment or customize Eclipse further, this must-have book will quickly bring you up to speed.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 23 reviews)

It Worked for Me

The reason this book gets both great and lousy reviews is that Eclipse is such a huge subject. The writing of Eclipse plug-ins is simply a larger subject than any reasonable book can cover. If the topics that the authors chose to cover happen to align with the ones you personally need, then the book is excellent, but if they don't align, the book isn't going to help you much. Part I (six chapters) covers using Eclipse to write programs. Part II (seven chapters) covers the fundamentals of Extending Eclipse with plug-ins. Part III (9 chapters) covers plug-ins in more depth. Part IV (5 chapters) covers extending Eclipse with new tools for the IDE. Part V (6 chapters) covers assorted extra topics, such as OLE and Active X integration and performance tuning. Part VI is a set of nine farily detailed exercises (with source code on the provided CD).

This book is not an overview, the authors opted instead to cover certain topics in pretty good depth. This aproach is good for those already aware of the basic concepts, but will be confusing for noobies (which I was when I first got it). I suggest that those new to Eclipse plug-in development start with a good overview (such as _Eclipse 3 for Java Developers_ by Daum) before switching over to this book for more detailed descriptions.

This book doesn't cover the Eclipse Modeling Framework or the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework, probably because each of these is a book in itself. This book is also light on its coverage of SWT and JFace, which you will need to be familiar with to develop your own plug-ins (again, a book-length subject in its own right). You will also want to be thoroughly familiar with Java Design Patterns and best practices, since Eclipse uses practically every design pattern you've ever heard of.

While there have been changes to Eclipse since the Second Edtion came out, I was able to figure it out and map between the examples in the book and Eclipse 3.2.1 without too much trouble.
January 25, 2007

first edition was much better (at least w.r.t. text editors)

The first edition was simply great. Not only that it was the first book to describe how to write an Eclipse plugin, it still would be the best -- if Eclipse had stand still. The second edition is not too bad. But the chapter on writing a text editor plugin is so superficial that it could have been left out. Where the first edition described in (necessary detail) how to write a text editor plugin, the second edition just roughly describes the concepts, but no API usage, no example in the book's text. The code on the accompanying CD is somewhat better, but now (2006) partially out of date as well. So if you want to write a text editor, there currently is no book or article I am aware of, that really helps you. You have to dig through existing code and try to find out for youself, why things are as they are.

Finally, the first part of the book on how to use Eclipse could have been removed (~20% of the book) and the chapters on how to write plugins should have been enhanced.
September 03, 2006

Waste of money

Like many others I wanted to extend Eclipse so I can be more productive. Unfortunately I found this book to be poorly written and the technical details vague. I know what I want to do, but the book (over 1000 pages) does not show me how?!

It explains the Eclipse architecture and idea goals which is fine but is repeated over and over again in various chapters of the book. I also could not get a handle on how it can be applied. This is not a practical guide to Eclipse. It is more about Eclipse's internal design which for most people is a waste of time. The online documents are more useful.

Note the book is also out of date. I tried to follow some of their sparse examples, but I quickly realized it's a waste of time because I have the latest Eclipse 3.11 installed and the examples were for Eclipse 3.0 and the menu options and API have changed. All in all, this book was a real let down.
December 27, 2005

Poorly organized book

The book composes of 6 parts.

Part 1 fouces on how to use the Eclipse IDE. The authors do a good job in explaining how to use the Eclipse IDE. Once a while, you will pick up some tricks that you will find extremely useful. Unfortunately, it also explains things that seems obvious from the UI perspective. In short, you read through 10 lines to get one line of useful information.

Part 6 are the exercises that illustrates some simple concepts discussed in the previous section. That part does a pretty good job also.

The other 4 parts discuss how to extend Eclips IDE and to write Rich Client application. Unfortunately, the authors fail miserable in organizing the information. I am expecting the authors will first explain the basic concepts and then start with some simple application and then build on that.

Unfortunately, the first few chapters in those parts does a very poor job to give you a comprehensive overview. Then the authors will get into details that will make you completely lost. The worst part is that when they are getting into details, the section will fill with a lot of "forward looking" statements like do not worry about some details which will explain in later chapter. Sometimes, you will find that if they reverse the order of the chapters, it may be easier for you to understand.

This book definitely needs a better Editor to make the information more coherent, and to condense the information better. The authors should re-organize the chapters/information to start from building a simple application with a window compose of a few views and some manual items.

August 14, 2005

Good book, bad approach

The book is very good. The problem is the examples. The examples are all heavily loaded and compounded. Like when you want to learn a certain type of a tree, instead you will be put into a dense forest and lost totally. I do not recomend the beginner to start with this book. I want the author to redesign the examples so that the topic be focused.

July 29, 2005

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins (2nd Edition) (Eclipse Series)
by Eric Clayberg, Dan Rubel

Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications (Eclipse Series)
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Eclipse Distilled (Eclipse Series)
by David Carlson

Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide
by Ed Burnette

Professional Eclipse 3 for Java Developers
by Berthold Daum