Eclipse In Action
By David Gallardo, Ed Burnette, Robert McGovern
383 pp, ISBN 1-930110-96-0, Price $44.95

<FONT size=2>Since its debut in November 2001 as a tool integration platform, Eclipse has been gathering momentum as a Java development environment. However, like many open source projects, a good user’s manual or reference guide has always been lacking. Users have had to read through the sketchy electronic documentation, learn through trial and error, and search for information across a variety of newsgroups or mailing lists to find what they need. With the release of “Eclipse in Action”, learning how to use Eclipse effectively has become much simpler.

<FONT size=2>If you’re a Java developer who wants to quickly learn how to use Eclipse as a development environment, chapters o­ne through six are the user’s guide for which you’ve been waiting. The authors begin the book by explaining the history of Eclipse, providing an overview of its key concepts, and taking the reader o­n a visual tour of the environment. o­nce these basics are explained, the remaining chapters in the section rapidly illustrate how to perform all the necessary tasks to develop an application using Eclipse, which include:

• Project setup
• Source code development, debugging and refactoring
• Application testing using Junit
• Error logging using Log4J
• Building your application with Ant
• Sharing your development project using CVS

This is a lot of information to be contained in less than two hundred pages, but it’s presented in a logical and incremental fashion that makes it easy to understand and absorb.

<FONT size=2>Since o­ne of Eclipse’s greatest strengths is its extensibility, no book o­n Eclipse would be complete without mentioning Eclipse’s plug-in model . For the more adventurous developer, part two of the book contains a concise introduction to developing plug-ins for Eclipse. By illustrating the construction
of a useful example plug-in, the primary development concepts are demonstrated logically and clearly. In fact, if more plug-in developers would just read these two chapters before jumping headlong into building the next “killer plug-in” for Eclipse, we could probably reduce the amount of questions o­n the Eclipse development forums by about half.

<FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2>In summary, if you’re new to Eclipse, read this book. It will save you countless hours of frustration spent rummaging around newsgroups looking for answers to your questions. Even if you’ve already been using Eclipse for a while, “Eclipse In Action” can fill in the gaps in your knowledge while providing you the foundation to begin to explore Eclipse o­n the next level, that of plug-in developer.