Product DescriptionProducing a commercial-quality plug-in effort accomplishment above and beyond the lowermost requirements necessary to consortium with Eclipse. It effort present to every those content that front to the “fit and polish” of a advertizing offering. This panoptic pass covers the full effect of plug-in development, including every the contestant steps needed to find the maximal calibre results.
Building [...]
Product Description
Producing a commercial-quality plug-in effectuation feat above and beyond the bottom requirements necessary to combine with Eclipse. It effectuation present to every those info that advance to the “fit and polish” of a advertizement offering. This broad pass covers the whole impact of plug-in development, including every the player steps necessary to attain the maximal calibre results.
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I got the book on time and the condition of the book was new as promised. Couldn’t question for more.
Cheers!
Rating: 5 / 5
I was at the book store, and checking out this book, I was impressed by the chapter on SWT widgets. It’s very well organized and gives a excellent, basic intro to the main widgets. Based on this, I figured that I’d buy the book and jump into plug-in development with both feet.
I should have checked the depth better. The initial chapters on the subject are just plain horrible. The info is incorrect–this is probably due to the fact that the book is not really accurate to v3.0 as it claims, but, rather, to an earlier milestone version. The code usually takes tweaking to get the example to work (again, possibly a problem due to the fact I have the latest version of the software). The explanations are woefully inadequate.
Specifics:
* The book describes how to use Plug-in unit tests, but the first one they give as an example fails. I don’t have enough experience with PED to get it passing.
* Couldn’t get any of the code in chapter 5 to run. Also, that code is just a tiny slice of an apparently huge pie, yet, it’s presented as complete coverage.
* Excample code uses deprecated methods (e.g. Plugin.getDescriptor()).
* Example code is stylistically poor (e.g. Person class uses public members as opposed to accessor/mutators).
* Code is often listed without any explanation or discussion of salient points. This just makes me reckon that it was place there to take up space. All in all, though I haven’t really counted, probably less than half the book is actual discussion, while the rest is useless code listings and/or useless screen shots (often not representing what I really see in the live version).
* The book comes of as an attempt at a cookbook approach: 1) Do x, 2)Do y… but the cookbook is out of sync with the modern appliances, so that the steps are either irrelevant or in the incorrect order.
* Unit Tests are presented AFTER the code they are testing. The point of a unit test is to place in place (and failing) before-hand, then write the code to make it pass.
* Claims that the book is the ‘best available’ are ludicrous when Kent Beck’s is on the market. Beck, is much much much better at technical writing, and he knows the product far more in depth.
I’ll give the the authors the BOD that they know what they’re talking about. They are responsible for a pretty (if not very functional) plug-in. Unfortunately, the guys at Addison-Wesley rushed to print with “covers eclipse 3.0,” when the authors weren’t talking about that.
Rating: 2 / 5
I bought this book based on people’s recommendations here and now I have to pay the dues and rebut their views: I feel this book lacks editing, and more than anything, decent explantation of the why and what.
In particular I loved the review of anohter person here who said he adored the book but.. so here’s my rebuttal, and I am not as pleased as he is with the book:
- The code examples have no comments and often have simple code errors.
- The book does not really provide any expanded information beyond what you get on the Eclipse help website [...]
I seem to expect a bit more from a book.
- Some of the code, and especially the screenshots, are outdated already. This is not the authors’ fault.
Nonetheless, with lots of code samples and nothing to clarify them in earnest, there is just no need to bother looking at the book. Get the Eclipse source code, look around of articles, or just get a different book. This may be about building commercial quality plug-ins, but is certainly not a commercial quality book.
Rating: 1 / 5
Can’t wait for the next version.
Rating: 5 / 5
I suppose this is more of a praise of Eclipse plug-in architecture and available documentation than a review of the book per se, but I did not get from Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins anything I could not by scanning online docs and playing with Eclipse myself. I was up and running with my plug-in project in a very small time without opening this book,
and once I did, I did not find anything eye-opening…
It may be simple to say that many such books are just a rehash of the wealth of online information already freely available, but sometimes the books do have added value, say, by presenting the material for quicker learning and/or reference. In this case, there can be no such added advantage – again, because the Eclipse project’s own design and documentation is very clear and thorough…
I realized all that before getting the book; in buying it, I was looking for another advantage – hidden tips and tricks, kind of like Covert Java. For example, how do I debug a plug-in project that depends on a non-plugin one?
No such luck.
I’ll be returning this book to the store now, and maybe trying to see if Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins is closer to what I want…
Rating: 2 / 5