Rating:  - Book Review: Eclipse
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.
Rating:  - Good introduction
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:  - Perfect for people who have never used Eclipse
Eclipse certainly breath new life into IDE based software development. Its capabilities are so impressive that even die-hard VIM developer like myself switch to use it as the main Java development tool. After using Eclipse for about a month, I am still running into new impressive functions. I wanted to find out all the cool stuffs Eclipse offers, thus I turned to this book by Steve Holzner.
I would say that this book is most suitable for those who have heard of eclipse but never had a chance to really use it. The first 5 chapters cover the daily operations a Java developer would do: coding, testing, debugging, committing, and building. Reading these chapters the reader can get the basic idea of how Eclipse differs from traditional IDEs, especially how well Eclipse supports refactoring, unit testing, and team development. For me, having used Eclipse for a month, these are all essential stuffs that I have already mastered. I was hoping to find out more tricks and secrets that can further improving the development process. For instance, I discovered code template the other day, which allows you to insert frequently used code snippets very quickly. I later find that this useful feature was introduced in page 59 of the book, which out any headings.
Chapters 6 up to 12 discuss specific development scenarios, including developing Swing applications, Struts applications, and plug-ins. These are interesting chapters to understand the concepts of plugins in Eclipse. They also introducted plugins that are quite useful, such as the V4ALL GUI designer, the Sysdeo Tomcat plugin, and the Easy Struts plugin. If you are planning to develop based on these frameworks, good for you. In addition, I would recommend trying the XML Buddy plugin (for editing XML files), Spindle (for developing Tapestry applications), and Jetty Launcher (for quick web application development).
Overall, the book can be a good starting point if you cannot find any Eclipse users around you. Otherwise, spending some time watching your friend perform magic with Eclipse and then start doing it yourself!
Rating: - The Monopoly on Eclilpse
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: - Not razor-sharp, but still recommended...
In preparation for a webcast I'm giving this month, I'm working through the book Eclipse by Steve Holzner (O'Reilly). While not perfect, it's a good tool for learning about the package.
Chapter list: Essential Eclipse; Java Development; Testing and Debugging; Working in Teams; Building Eclipse Projects Using Ant; GUI Programming: From Applets to Swing; SWT: Buttons, Text, Labels, Lists, Layouts, and Events; SWT: Menus, Toolbars, Sliders, Trees, and Dialogs; Web Development; Developing Struts Applications with Eclipse; Developing a Plug-in: The Plug-in Development Environment, Manifests, and Extension Points; Developing a Plug-in: Creating Editors and Views; Eclipse 3.0; Index
For the person new to Eclipse, this will do a decent job in getting you started. Up through the Using Ant chapter, the focus is primarily on Eclipse. The examples deal with the package, and that seems to be the primary focus. After that, the style seems to change a bit. The GUI development chapters seem to focus a lot on GUI programming, and then after that's finished, they show you how to do it in Eclipse. Mind you, it's good information, but the focus has shifted. The plug-in chapter gets back to Eclipse as the primary focus again. While there are entire books dedicated to plug-in development, this chapter will get you comfortable with the idea and concepts.
So is the book perfect? No. I feel that the material could have been a bit more consistent as to what the foremost goal was... learning the Eclipse platform. But having said that, it still accomplishes the goal of teaching you how Eclipse works in different scenarios. I'd definitely recommend this as an initial Eclipse text for someone.
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