MEETINGS

DJUG LINKS

WIKI QUICK LINKS

Book Reviews

This book review was submitted by a DenverJUG member as part of the Book Review Program.

BOOK DETAILS

REVIEWER

Jeff Wang

REVIEW

The "official" IDE at my day job is IntelliJ. But I have been "playing" with Eclipse for more than two years, and before that, used IBM Visual Age for Java, the predecessor of Eclipse.

I finished the book in several hours. Not that it is a pager-turner like "Da Vinci Code." I could not find any new information. Realizing it might be unfair to a tool book, I was hesitating to declare this book "not useful."

It just happened that a mathematician friend of mine decided he had no better use for his spare time than learning Java programming. So I gave the book to him, with a warning that the Eclipse he downloaded would look a little bit differently from the screen shots in the book.

Three weeks later, he told me that he learned how to program applets and web applications using Eclipse by following the book, and now happily started building his first web application to manage his math papers and Bach CD collection. (He skipped Chapters 4, 7, 8, 11, and 12.)

Hence, here is the summary: This is really an introduction to Eclipse. If you have used Eclipse, or any IDEs (vi, and TextPad do not count. Sorry.), you probably do not need this book.

Moreover, the claim "Coverage of 3.0" on its cover is only valid for the very last chapter, apparently added just before the printer started running.

Intended Audience

The book claims "... this book is for every Java programmer, from the architect who wants to master his IDE to the most junior programmer...." But it is really for the latter.

The Contents

The book has 317 pages, and 13 chapters.

The first chapter, "Essential Eclipse," explains some basic concepts in Eclipse, like workspace, workbench, view and perspective. The second half of this chapter and the second chapter, "Java Development," covers the very basics on creating projects, writing, building, and running code, and refactoring, in Eclipse.

"Testing andDebugging," Chapter 3, is about using JUnit in Eclipse, and Eclipse's debugger.

Chapter 4 is "Working in Teams", i.e., Eclipse and CVS.

"Building Eclipse Projects Using Ant" (Chapter 5) is, well, just that.

Chapter 6, "GUI Programming: From Applets to Swing," concentrates on writing AWT and Swing in Eclipse.

Chapters 7 and 8 are about Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), IBM's replacement for AWT and Swing.

Chapter 9, "Web Development," covers the basics of web application development, including Servlet, JSP, and Tomcat. Please notice that with tags, people are moving away from embedding scriptlets in JSPs

And then web application development gets the MVC flavor in Chapter 10, "Developing Struts Applications with Eclipse."

Chapters 11 and 12 introduce the extensibility of Eclipse: writing Eclipse Plugins. On this topic, "Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins" by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck is a very good read.

Chapter 13, "Eclipse 3.0," backs up the claim "Coverage of 3.0" on the book cover.