Customer Reviews

Eclipse

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If only this book had stayed on course. Chapters one through three are a great introduction to installing Eclipse and using it to work with Java applications. It then takes a turn away from Eclipse by covering CVS in chapter four, and then continues into a basic Java development book in all of the chapters that follow. If I wanted a book on how to develop Struts I would buy Programming Jakarta Struts. I don't need chapter ten to give me a cursory glimpse into Struts programming. Only the first hundred pages are really about Eclipse. Which is a shame because there is so much to say about the Eclipse platform. I can't recommend this book.

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.

Online documentation has its place, but I like books better for learning. I found Eclipse's online doc especially lacking when it comes to *learning* about this complex product. Sure there's a ton of stuff, but most of it just seems to describe the ten's of thousands of options that the tool provides. (Personal Rant: Do we really need all of these options? Can't anyone see that just because you can do something doesn't mean you always should? Can't anyone see that a lot of these options just get in the way of using the product?)
There, I feel better now. So when it came time to learn about Eclipse I reached for a book. I can recommend this book because it is good but I can't recommend it because it is getting dated. And that's just the nature of the beast when you write a book about a product as opposed to a technology. (The latter also gets out of date, but not as quickly. Maybe it's because there are less screen shots of actual components.)
For the most part the screen shots of the dialogs and menus are still useful, i.e. even though the product's UI has changed you can still easily go from the book to the component you are looking at on the screen. But... well, here are the versions of various products covered in the book versus the versions of these products today:
Eclipse 2.1.1 vs. 3.1
Ant 1.5.3 vs. 1.6.5
Tomcat 4.1.29 vs. 5.5
Struts 1.1 vs. 1.2.7
Another thing I did not like: they used "poor programming practices" in their chapters on JSPs and servlets. For example, in JSPs they used scriptlets and in servlets they output a bunch of HTML. I don't like it when a book does stuff "we're not supposed to do anymore."

I bought this book and have been making my way through it to teach myself about Eclipse. I did fine for the first five chapters, but after that the trail grows cold because the book is based on Eclipse prior to the 3.0 and later releases. I began having lots of problems because the instructions and screen shots no longer came close to matching what is actually in Eclipse 3.0. So I gave up after chapter five.

If you use Eclipse or any of the expanding list of products based on Eclipse, this book should be on your short list. It is easy to read and follow as the author explains in detail each of the core features which are common across all derivations of Eclipse. The book is geared toward Java developers and will be of limited use to developers who wish to use Eclipse for other languages (which the author essentially admits on page one). It lives up to the claim found in the preface: "It's a programmer-to-programmer book, written to bring you up to speed in Eclipse without wasting time."

If you are new to Eclipse, I would definitely recommend this book. It's a great "bring you up to speed" book. There are a lot of screenshots and code examples to move you through each of the basic features: how to create, debug, test (with JUnit), use source control (with CVS) and build (with Ant).

Depending on how familiar you are with Eclipse (I have been using Eclipse for a couple years), this may not be the book for you. The first hundred pages or so will likely not be anything new - although, I did have an "Oh, yeah - Scrapbook Pages!" moment. If you are interested in using SWT, Tomcat, Struts or Eclipse plug-in development, keep in mind this is more of a "bring you up to speed" than a detailed "how to" description of these topics.

I've used big time and expensive IDEs in my time, Together Control Center to name just one, and I was excited to finally get Eclipse and begin learning it. I always look for an O'Reilly book on a subject first because they are usually really good. This book, although good, misses the point of the title of the book. It should have been titled "Intro to Web Programming with an Introduction to Eclipse".

Another reviewer pointed out that the first three chapters covers how to use Eclipse. The rest concentrate on actually using Eclipse to do each chapter's small projects - GUI, Web, and plugins.

I was looking for a book that covered Eclipse in total, how to use it, the neat stuff, everything that Eclipse has to offer. This book doesn't even tell me how to makea bookmark in Eclipse. I saw that in the Eclipse Cookbook TOC at O'Reilly.

The 3.0 coverage is minimal. This book is not about 3.0. That is to be expected since software changes faster than authors can learn the new versions and write the words.

This is a good book if you want a very gentle intro to Eclipse, but don't look to become an Eclipse GURU from it.

The first 3 chapters were quite good. It might be a good book if it was updated. There have been many changes since Eclipse 3.0 and the screens are different. Some of the stuff I could figure out and was stuck after that. Even the programming examples are outdated. You have to spend way too much time debugging their Java examples to try to learn Eclipse. Don't waste your time on this book! There are better free tutorials on the web.

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.

I was just dropped into a position where I'm using Eclipse, Java, and Tomcat, and this book is PERFECT. (I very rarely buy computer books because, frankly, most of the info is online, but I'm glad I bought this one.) I have used Java a great deal, but never Eclipse or Tomcat, and this book got me up to speed very quickly. It was exactly what I needed. It also has a good chapter on Ant (which is a "make" replacement) and a great chapter introducing Struts development. With this book I also learned how I can control the Tomcat server right from within Eclipse using a free plugin for Eclipse. If you're in a similar situation where you have a job where you need to learn Eclipse quickly, then this book is for you. I highly recommend it.

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!