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 24 reviews)

Fairly good self-studied book on eclipse plugins. by Konstantinos M.

4 Stars
December 12, 2008
Provides well explained exercises and examples of eclipse plugins. Covers all aspects of developing your own plugin and much more...Recommended tutorial and reference book. The book gradually helps readers who are even new to Eclipse to get the most out of eclipse capabilities.

It Worked for Me by Robert Hafernik (Austin, Tx USA)

4 Stars
January 25, 2007
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.

first edition was much better (at least w.r.t. text editors) by K. Victor Volle (Germany)

2 Stars
September 03, 2006
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.

Waste of money by Dat Phung (NY, USA)

1 Stars
December 27, 2005
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.

Poorly organized book by J. Hui (Fremont, CA USA)

1 Stars
August 13, 2005
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.

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	Eclipse Plug-ins (3rd Edition) by Eric Clayberg (Author), Dan Rubel (Author) Producing a commercial-quality plug-in means going above and beyond the minimal requirements needed to integrate with Eclipse. It means attending to all those details that contribute to the “fit and polish” of a commercial offering. This comprehensive guide covers the entire process of plug-in development, including all the extra steps needed to achieve the highest quality results. Building on two internationally best-selling previous editions, Eclipse Plug-ins, Third Edition, has...
	Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide by Ed Burnette (Author) Eclipse is the world's most popular IDE for Java development. And although there are plenty of large tomes that cover all the nooks and crannies of Eclipse, what you really need is a quick, handy guide to the features that are used over and over again in Java programming. You need answers to basic questions such as: Where was that menu? What does that command do again? And how can I set my classpath on a per-project basis? This practical pocket guide gets you up to speed quickly with...
	Eclipse for Dummies by Barry Burd (Author) In his friendly, easy-to-understand style, the bestselling author of Java 2 For Dummies shows developers how to get up to speed fast on this popular Java IDE Eclipse, an open source product originally developed by IBM, has an estimated 500,000 users-a 45 percent market share among Java IDEs Shows Java developers how to maximize programming productivity with Eclipse, covering all the basics as well as advanced techniques such as using Ant, developing new Eclipse plug-ins,...
	Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications by Jeff McAffer (Author), Jean-Michel Lemieux (Author) Eclipse, a platform for building applications, was originally aimed at Web application and image manipulation. With the release of Eclipse 3.0 there has been a shift to the use of Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform (RCP). In other words, using Eclipse as a base for everyday generic applications from media players to productivity and desktop applications. Thinking of Eclipse as not just an IDE but a platform for all application building is an evolution for the platform and significantly...
	Professional Eclipse 3 for Java Developers by Berthold Daum (Author) Step-by-step guide that introduces novices to using all major features of Eclipse 3 Eclipse is an open source extensible integrated development environment (IDE) that helps Java programmers build best-of-breed integrated tools covering the whole software lifecycle-from conceptual modeling to deployment Eclipse is fast becoming the development platform of choice for the Java community Packed with code-rich, real-world examples that show programmers how to speed up the...