Robert A. Balfe said
Probably the #1 book I recommend to people who want to get started with the Eclipse platform. It dives pretty deep into what Eclipse and the RCP is all about. If you intend on doing any Eclipse development then this is the place to start.
N. Lightened said
I'd been using the Eclipse IDE for several projects and decided it was time to come up to speed on RCP. On a quick thumb-through in the bookstore this book seemed about as good as any, but I particularly liked that they application they proposed to build as part of the learning process was something that incorporated many key aspects of most RCP projects -- UI, network, database, etc.
Up through chapter 3 it does a fair job of bootstrapping you into an Eclipse IDE, target, and plug-in development environment to where you can, by typing in the example code, and, skulling around to figure out the parts they left out, get the initial though as yet useless client to come up. Once you get past that initial section, however, you're basically on your own as they start to leave out more and more of critical parts. Oh, you can load each "stage" of the application from the CD provided with the book, but understanding how you got from one incomplete stage to the next is harder when you're just looking at someone else's code, rather than building it up yourself.
If you never intend to build your own RCP, it's probably as good as any other book. If, however, you want something that gets down to nuts and bolts, makes you get your hands dirty with code, this is not the book for you.
A. Rick Anderson said
If you have a current installation of Eclipse and you are using JPA (ex: Hibernate), don't even think about using the book's update site. It will totally hose up your entire Eclipse installation and you are looking at a complete re-installation.
It's a shame, because otherwise the book seems to be very helpful. Rumor is that they are planning an update sometime late 2008, but none of the bookstores have a publication date on it yet.
William Menger said
I purchased 8 copies and distributed them to our team. Several team members went through each chapter, building the sample application on top of the Eclipse RCP. Each of us, whether or not we built the application, have learned a great deal about using Eclipse. I highly recommend this book to any software team that is starting a new product or that is in the throes of refactoring / recasting an old one. The book will jump-start your Eclipse experience.
Bruno N. G. Zica said
I couldn't do my RCP application without this book. its example application goes growing showing everything we need to learn to make an RCP application.
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