“Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs” by John Arthorne and Chris Laffra is one of my favourite books on Eclipse. I use it pretty much daily (at least I do when I’m wading into a part of Eclipse that I haven’t worked with yet). It’s true that some parts of some entries are out of date, but by-in-large I find the book to be a very useful resource. In general, if you follow the advice given by the book, comments in the code that it points you to will let you know if you should be looking elsewhere. I think that including a specific version number in the title of the book was a mistake: unfortunately, it helps reinforce the perception that the book is out of date even though it is still a very useful resource.
A while back, I defended John and Chris’ decision to not make the entire contents of the book available online for free. Sure that’d have been cool, but I respect an author’s decision to try and reap benefits from their hard work (I’m sure the publisher also had some say in the matter). But all that is behind us. John and Chris have put the contents of the book on the Eclipse Wiki. This is great for two reasons: first, the information is out there and is available to all (even those of us who are too lazy to go to the bookstore); second, it’s editable. Sure, only committers can edit the Wiki today (that may change), but the committers do tend to know a little something about the inards of Eclipse.
If you find something wrong with an entry in the FAQs, be sure to make a Bugzilla report against the Wiki so that somebody in the know can take a shot at fixing it…
