I had an opportunity today to stop by the bookstore and pick up a copy of the new Eclipse Rich Client Platform by Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux.
It occurred to me today as I was looking for the book that there are a lot of titles on there discussing various aspects of Eclipse. I thought I might take this opportunity to list a few of my favourites.
Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications by Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux. I’ve written a full review of this book.
Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-ins by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck. As a matter of practice, I read everything that Kent Beck writes (though I have to admit that I didn’t enjoy Test Driven Design as much as I had hoped I would). I like this book a lot, but I find the example they use throughout the book a little too confusing at times. Maybe that’s not so bad as the book actually forces the reader to think and thinking’s not a bad thing to do. Still, the book has a lot of great and useful information if you’re serious about building plug-ins. I especially like the collection of rules they introduce.
Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs by John Arthorne and Chris Laffra. The thing that I like most about this book is that I didn’t have to actually read it. It collects frequently asked questions about Eclipse which are easily found using either the table of contents or the index. Once you find the right question (and answer), the book directs you to related questions. The one problem with this book is that it can become outdated rather quickly; however, at this point, most of the information in the book is still relevant.
Of course, these are my favourites from the subset of all the great books on Eclipse that I’ve actually read. It’s a little curious that all these books are from the same series (“The Eclipse Series” by Addison Wesley). I think I might purposefully pick one that’s not from this series next time.