Foreword

Every artisan in every craft employs tools that extend and amplify the craftsman and through which their creativity is made manifest. For the code warrior, the integrated development environment (IDE) is typically home, the place in which and with which all work is carried out. The IDE is therefore at the center of the developer experience in building, deploying, and evolving quality software-intensive systems.

Over the past several decades, resources for the developer have evolved from command-line tools to disparate desktop tools to the integrated experience we take for granted today. Eclipse is perhaps the most important realization of that experience: not only is the Eclipse platform a powerful foundation for development, but as an open source application it is also a broadly supported and extensible home for developers of all domains working in a variety of languages.

Eclipse is indeed a rich platform, but as such it may appear far too rich for those developers who simply want to carry out the essential tasks of development. In this book, Dave does an excellent job presenting the most important and most common-use cases for Eclipse: installation, programming and refactoring, debugging, testing, configuring, and releasing. It is all too easy for this genre of book to be little more than extended product documentation, but Dave does far more by offering a conceptual model of Eclipse as well as very detailed and visually approachable scenarios for using the platform in an agile context by individuals as well as by teams. Dave also addresses the creature comforts and daily hygiene provided by Eclipse, through which the developer experience may be customized to the particular needs of the individual.

For the novice, you'll find this book to be a gentle yet firm guide to the essentials of Eclipse. For the experienced user—well, I've been using Eclipse myself for some time, and I discovered a number of useful things that have shaved a few rough edges in my use of the IDE.

Grady Booch
IBM Fellow