by David Gallardo, Ed Burnette, Robert McGovern
Published by Manning Publications

Review by Paul Hill

One pundant on usenet suggested that Eclipse has a learning curve like Emacs and that this is a good thing, because of boths power and flexibility. While I think Eclipse is more usable and seems to be easier to extend than that old war horse EMACS, the scope of what IS in Eclipse can be daunting. More importantly it is useful to get your head around the way the GUI is organized, so you can effecticvely use the tool. At less than 400 pages, you might think this book would not cover the ground, but this is not the case. This book specifically says it is not intended as a hardcopy version of the on-line help. The goal of the book is to get you started and you move you into some of the more interesting aspects of the IDE. I found the book to have succeeded well at it goal.

Continuing a recent trend from Manning this seems to be another well edited book that is kept managable in size, yet still containing a large amount of information. The book doesn't waste a lot of time getting started, by chapter three you are already learning about using JUnit, Log4J and the debugger. In later chapters, the authors have you working with Ant and CVS after working up a nice little example that that they even spend some time refactoring using the built in features of Eclipse. Integrated tool use would probably be sufficient, but they proceed to jump off into web development leveraging one of the hundreds of plugins available for Eclipse and show you how to debug directly in Eclipse using tomcat. In just over 200 pages a lot of very useful material has been covered.

Part 2 of the book goes on to show you how to write your own plugins which I haven't done yet, so can't comment. For those who just can't stand a well written narrative and instructional style, there is even a thin 16 page chapter of mostly tables for all the Java development menu options and another appendix listing all plug-in extension points. For those who are wondering if they can replace the IDEs they have which help with their Swing layout and development, you may be interested in noting that the SWT is regulated to its own appendix keeping with the emphasis of Java on the server. Since Eclipse is an open API and open source there are 300+ of plugins available for it. There are at least two Swing development plugins available, most of which appear to be in their early stages of development

So if you thought that such a little book wouldn't cover much more than what real newbie would need you will missing a good book.