Julio Santos

The book that got me hooked to Eclipse plug-in development. It’s big, more than 1000 pages long, but with no fluff. The first part (200 pages) do cover the basics on how to *use* Eclipse, but it suited me at the time. I barely knew how to use it, though I knew I wanted to extend it. Jim et al do a nice job at explaining fairly deep Eclipse concepts, and making them seem easy. This books reminds me of the Petzold (if you were a Windows programmer circa 1990). My guess would be that the majority of all Eclipse plug-in developers, have at least one copy (I have two, because 1,000 pages make for a heavy book to carry between home and work.

The toolkit for building GUIs. Rather than adopting Swing, the Eclipse community built their own toolkit from the ground up. The advantage of Swing is that apps look the same on all platforms. The problem with Swing is that apps look the same on all platforms…but they don’t look like any other non-swing app on any given platform. SWT fixes that by providing a wrapper around native controls.

Not much to say about this book. It’s okay. Oh, and I don’t know if there will be a volume 2.

I came to Eclipse later than most, only after Eclipse 3.0 was out. Maybe because of that, “Contributing to Eclipse” was never the most important book on Eclipse I had, as it covers Eclipse 2.1 stuff. But it’s by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma, so it’s going to be good no matter what. It is a good book, and surprise surprise, they show how to build a test environment.

Here’s an easy one. This book is not about plug-in development but about using Eclipse. But it goes a little beyond explaining what this menu does or what that button triggers, or even how to do build and debug.

It does that, but it also covers agile practices (continuous integration, test first) and how to use Eclipse for doing those. It’s nice and sweet. If you’re going to collect Eclipse books, this should be somewhere in there.

The first edition only covered Eclipse 3.0, but this second edition covers Eclipse 3.1 and 3.2.

This is one of my favorite Eclipse books on writing plug-ins. It covers most if not all aspects of building plug-ins, in a very clear manner. They stay focused on building plug-ins though so you’d better already know how to use Eclipse.

The authors cover Testing, SWT, CVS, Help, Branding, etc. For every chapter, they go in detail on what it means to be “Ready for Rational”.

This is outside the realm of building Eclipse plug-ins, but might be interesting still. It certainly was interesting to me.

BIRT stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools. As the name implies, it’s about reporting tools. Currently (May ‘06) is more about reporting tools than about BI tools.

With this book you’ll learn how to use BIRT “out of the box” for building nice looking customized reports. It’s really a book for teaching non-programmers how to use BIRT.

I’ve read the pre-publication version of the book, and enjoyed it a lot. I’ll check the actual published version when it comes (June ‘06) to look for differences if any.

The second volume on BIRT. This one is really for programmers. It shows how to extend BIRT. Not only BIRT was designed to extended, it was also designed to be extended in more than one way. This books covers them all.

You learn how to add logic to your reports, in Javascript or Java. How to provide “scripted data sources” (POJOs really) and how to contribute to Eclipse. A must for anyone doing more with BIRT than the basics.

Here too, I only read the pre-publication copy.

This was a little misleading, but maybe it was my own fault. I thought I was going to be reading a book on how to *extend* the J2EE Standard Tools (JST) and instead this is a book about *using* the JST. That authors do an alright job covering a lot of the J2EE stuff (JSPs, Servlets, Web Services, EJBs, and all the rest). I could never get over the fact that this was not a book for committers, but like I said, my fault. Still recommended if you just want to write J2EE apps with Eclipse.

Edit: The first time I (tried to) read this book I didn’t like it. I read it again and changed my mind about it. It’s actually very decent. For me the trick was to understand that the authors were not taking the typical approach of teaching a tough subject, starting easy and building up. Instead they start by showing the end result of an EMF “session” and then they break it into smaller pieces. The second time around, it felt like a code review. I posted about my flip-flopping.

A whole book on EMF! EMF allows you to build whole application models, from UML, XML or even Java. I wanted to get into EMF, because I thought I was going to need it for building graphical tools in Eclipse (using GMF), but I was mistaken. In fact I can use EMF for any application with a model, which is almost any application. The book though, not that great. It’s a little raw, with no crescendo, it just starts strong right away, and stays so for almost 700 pages. Ouch. I still haven’t finished and I’m hoping I can get by without having to read it.

The second edition seems to be in the works.

I’m still reading this one but so far it’s a real blast. I didn’t think it could add much more to what the other Eclipse books had already said, but I figured I’d give it a try. If nothing else to learn the difference between RCP (standalone client applications) and Eclipse plug-ins.

A third of the way into the book, and I’m convinced that I should have made this my first Eclipse book. The authors build an instant messenger desktop app, step by step.

While I’m reading a book, I like to take notes and underline certain passages I don’t want to forget. Typically a book I like will have lots of handwritten notes and underlines. This is one of those (so far).