Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

This book is the best of the Eclipse plug-in development guides I have encountered (and I think I have seen just about all of them). Dr. Blewitt not only presents the material in a clear and logical progression, but also explains the importance of each development action. Even more impressive, in my opinion, is his uncanny ability to anticipate the questions you will have and provide both answers and explanations. A must-have book for anyone doing Eclipse development, whether you are focusing on 3.x or 4.x.

Great book! Example-driven, it covers the creation of Plug-in for the Eclipse Platform. After each example, the “What just happened?” sections provide more information.This book can be also useful for people starting to work with the eclipse platform. It really starts from the beginning (plug-in creation, swt and jface). It also covers more advanced topic (testing and building).If you are looking for an Eclipse 4 book, read carefully the subtitle of the book: “How to develop, build, test, package, and release Eclipse plug-ins with features for Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4.x”. This is not only an Eclipse 4 book. The e4 concepts are well covered in the Chapter 7. Several examples cover the tooling installation, the e4 model, the injection of services, the application context…I was in particular interested by Chapter 9: “Automated Tested of Plug-ins” that provides some hints about testing. It describes how you can use SWTBot to test your UI code.I recommend this book!Why didn’t I give 5 stars: for me it would make more sense to describe eclipse 3 and eclipse 4 the other way around. Describe Eclipse 4 first and add some side notes for people who want to use Eclipse 3 (or who want to mix both approaches).

I have found this book to be almost useless. I am a very experienced Java (and Android) developer. I spend a lot of time learning from books when I undertake new technologies. I never wrote an Eclipse plug-in before, and I thought this book would help. The book title, "...Development by Example" suggests it gives lots of examples.Unfortunately, the method of the book is to take a single plug-in project and show how it is developed. All of the examples are the step-by-step development of that one project. This, alone, is not a problem. However, the example is pretty far off the main-stream, and the author doesn't seem to think beyond this one example.The single most valuable resource in any book which will be used a reference is a thorough index. The index (or the book) is terribly incomplete, which makes it more-or-less useless as a reference. There is no excuse for this as an incomplete index just indicates laziness on the part of the author. When questions arise during the course of developing the plug-in I'm working on, I have yet to find an answer in this book--because of the poor indexThis book might be valuable if one were to devote the time necessary to work through it from beginning to end, but I would not purchase this book (especially given the price) unless you intend to do so.The book also fails to direct readers to other resources (e.g. wiki.eclipse.org, which a great resource).

I'm French, sorry for my bad English: the author knows in depth concepts (SWT, JFace, E4) and avoids to illustrate the explanations with too many copies of screen for creating plugins. I recommend this book!

An excellent book properly organized covering complex topics in an appropriate way. The book includes to the point information but at the same time comprehensive enough to explain all the core concepts. It starts explaining the concepts from the scratch and then gradually increases up the speed in an efficient way; so, the user won’t feel difficulty at any stage.Additions of Pop quiz and Have a go hero sections offer an effective way of grasping the difficult theories properly. Pop quiz after every topic always keeps the reader interested and provide an easy way to check his/her level of understanding. Have a go hero section provides user with the required practice to learn the implementation of theoretical concepts practically.Apart from the impressive explanation and implementation of concepts such as SWT, JFace, Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4 model, it also clarify the necessary inner details of resource handling to develop lively and competent applications. A brief description about the usage of eclipse preferences and settings provides a relief for most of the developers to do maximum work with minimum effort.

Very helpful in teaching a beginner to build plug-ins in Eclipse. The book consists of step by step exercises which are very informative. Working through the exercises grew my competence with Eclipse. The book is not meant to be read but used.

It is not a secret that Eclipse has a really steep learning curve when you are getting into it for the first time.This book made that "aha!" moment for me to happen in reasonable time and I'm returning to this book time to time as needed.I will not tell this is the next best thing since people invented a wheel: book is not ideal in the way how it is formatted and how the table of contents is organized, but this book is definitely a great help, especially considering lack of good information on E4 platform overall past Lars Vogel's online guides (which are way too basic).I would buy it again.