4.0 out of 5 stars
Eclipse, July 12 2005
This review is from: Eclipse (Paperback)
One of the problems with Open Source software is getting good books describing it. Sure it's possible to get documentation on-line, but sometimes there is no substitute in having all the information in one convenient book. Steve Holzner has done a good job in describing the various aspects of Eclipse. Coverage includes: the Eclipse Java Development Tools and Workbench, Ant, CVS, building Swing apps, SWT, JSP along with a host of other topics.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent, readable introduction to Eclipse, July 12 2004
This review is from: Eclipse (Paperback)
I have been working with Eclipse and its derivatives (e.g., IBM/Rational's XDE for Java) for over a year now. The most significant reality about Eclipse for a user is its long learning curve. There is so much in Eclipse, and just knowing what you can configure is a challenge. When I read Holzner's book last month, from the first chapter I kept bemoaning, "Why didn't I have this book a year ago?" I can recommend this book without reservation for anyone moving to Eclipse as a Java development environment. Many recent books focus specifically on writing plug-ins for Eclipse. Holzner covers writing a simple plug-in, but what he has written is a book for developers who want to use Eclipse to write and test real Java applications.
Holzner's style is to cover a lot of ground without getting tediously deep into any single subject area. This is one reason his writing is so readable. In this book he has a very nice introduction to using the JUnit perspective for automated unit testing, a concise introduction to the debug perspective, a chapter on Ant for building projects, and integrating Eclipse with the CVS software repository.
Holzner spends several chapters on GUI and web development, but don't look for detailed information on how to do Swing, or JSPs. Holzner's focus is on how Eclipse supports development in these areas. He has a chapter on Swing GUI application development, two chapters on SWT (IBM's Standard Widget Toolkit) development, and a very accessible chapter on using Eclipse for web development with JSPs, servlets, javabeans, and how to use the Sysdeo Tomcat plug-in to simplify your life. I was not aware of this plug-in until I read this book, and knowing about it was almost worth the price of the book. The chapter on Struts development was the least clear to me, only because I have not worked with Struts, but if you understand the Model-View-Controller architecture you will be able to get a good understanding in this chapter of what Struts is trying to provide, and how Eclipse will support you.
Holzner offers two chapters on developing plug-ins, and I am impressed that he could convey so much in just two chapters. Plug-in development can be very complex, but Holzner presents the basic requirements very cogently. He closes out the book with a pro-spective on Eclipse 3.0, now finally available at eclipse.org.
It was a fun, quick read, and even after more than a year of using Eclipse I learned some really nice things from this book.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Covers Basic Fuctions, Jun 28 2004
This review is from: Eclipse (Paperback)
The book does have lots of graphics as referred to by other reviewers but they are appropriate and explain the text. "One picture is worth a 1000 words".
Common development tasks are covered in enough detail to help beginners and those new to an IDE.
Not everyone likes to read the online help to learn how to use software while most of us will search for a specific topic. This book satisfies the need for a clear understandable how to manual of the basic functionality. Just think of it as the printed user manual for those who like to have a paper reference.
The only criticism is that the cover reference to coverage of 3.0 is misleading because it is discussed in only 18 pages out of 295.
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