Julio Santos

The first time I read this book I didn’t really any EMF stuff, and was just curious. I didn’t like the book at all, I said so here. At the time, I decided to give up about 20% in the book.

I’m working on a new project that could benefit from EMF and had been avoiding ever going back to this book. I figured that learning from doing was the way to go. Also online tutorials I guess. Unfortunately there’s only so far I could get with that more adventurous approach, and I finally decided that maybe I was ready for another try.

This time I started reading the book less casually, actually putting some effort into it. Really trying to understand what the authors were saying, and I must say that I think I got it. The book is not an intro to EMF (and even less to Eclipse) and the quicker you understand that the better.

It reads like a code review of what’s going on when a model is used to generate code. I think this was the breakthrough for me, understanding that I was not learning about EMF the typical way, where the author(s) start slow and easy, and build up from there. Instead the authors take the approach that there’s a gazillion lines of code here, let’s explore it.

Knowing this, the book is not so bad and I actually managed to learn from it. Grab it if you need to learn EMF, and don’t be a fool like I was, dropping it as soon as it became hard to read.

I still want to complain about the 300 pages of APIs though.