Search in Book Reviews

If you need to customise or extend the Eclipse platform but you are not entirely sure what you are doing then this book is likely to be helpful. The 361 questions and answers seem well thought-out to give you some pointers no matter what you are trying to do, and it is particularly useful when you are not well practised at navigating around Eclipse, its documentation and all the Eclipse-related information out there.

The book is well indexed and navigable and many questions are cross-referenced. It also comes with a CD-ROM that contains the complete text of the book in HTML, packaged up in a form suitable for installing onto Eclipse as a plugin. This adds itself to the Eclipse help system, hence giving you the choice of accessing it that way if you prefer. This kind of dual-format publishing should perhaps be done more often; it gives you the choice of reading online or paper depending on the circumstances. As you might expect, the CD-ROM also has the source code to the examples, and a nice touch is the inclusion of a mirror of the eclipse.org downloads and supporting documentation as well.

There is also a reference to the book's website, which is heavily dependent on scripting and I found it does not work at all on my browser just because I have set it up with different fonts and colours because I am partially sighted. Therefore, I cannot comment on the content of the website, but that is beyond the scope of this review.

Apart from the website, I would recommend this book to those that need it - developers who need to extend or customize Eclipse and are not entirely sure what they are doing. Others (including ordinary users of Eclipse) might benefit a little from this book but it probably would not justify a purchase in their case.