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Summary: Hands on tour through Eclipse 2!!! Plugin Development
Review: This book takes you through a tour on plugin development. The main disadvantage of this book is that it is for Version 2 and not Version 3 of Eclipse. Yes you can somehow manage to translate and find your way around. Anyhow this is quite annoying not always successful and maybe one wants to learn more about the special advertised feature of Eclipse 3: rich client platforms. A topic inherently connected to plugin development. Please give us a new version of this book.
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Summary: Excellent introduction to the Eclipse mindset
Review: This is one of the best technical books I've read this year. I hope Kent Beck and Erich Gamma will team up for more books in the future, because they are excellent writers and teachers.I bought this book because I wanted to start writing Eclipse plugins. While there's nothing wrong with that, having read the book I now realize there's SO much more subtlety in contributing to Eclipse than slapping together some code and calling it a plugin. The book builds progressively more functionality into a single contribution, and I can't think of a better way for the book to be structured. I highly recommend working along in Eclipse, because it's very easy to pick up the rhythm of working with the various bits and pieces that add up to a contribution. Not only did I learn how these bits and pieces fit together, but I also developed an appreciation for just how well-architected the Eclipse framework is. I enjoyed the book so much that I immediately started re-reading it after finishing it the first time. Highly recommended!
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Summary: The Big Picture of Eclipse
Review: Two widely know and experienced software authors came together to produce this book. Their writing skill shows clearly in the clarity of the step-by-step pedagogy that they use. They define a "Contribution Circle" of different types of Eclipse usage, from User to Configurer to Extender to Publisher to Enabler and back to User. They suggest how each role can get code from its predecessor, add to it or extract ideas for a new code base, and then offer these new changes to its successor. In doing so, we see the emergence of a virtuous positive feedback loop, and the rise of an Eclipse community. Granted, this may sound nice but vague. So Gamma and Beck proceed in the book to describe 4 such circles, in gradually increasing detail, that illustrate the concept. As is obligatory in a software text, they start with the demotic "Hello World". The coding is trivial. But even here, they show the various needed files and a look at the Eclipse framework. Plus, and this is good teaching style, most readers will gain some understanding immediately from this first example. Encourages you to delve further. (As opposed to a text that is totally over most readers' heads from the first chapter.) The book gives the big picture of Eclipse, in explaining the various roles of users. As such, it is a good complement to other Eclipse texts, which tend to focus on specific Eclipse features or applications.
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