Rating  - Must Have
If you are looking into Eclipse plugins programming, this is the book. It not only teaches you the basics but also guides you to the best pratices on Eclipse development, with test driven philosophy. Needless to say, it also covers design patterns used by Eclipse.
Rating  - Hands on tour through Eclipse 2!!! Plugin Development
This book takes you through a tour on plugin development. The main disadvantage of this book is that it is for Version 2 and not Version 3 of Eclipse. Yes you can somehow manage to translate and find your way around. Anyhow this is quite annoying not always successful and maybe one wants to learn more about the special advertised feature of Eclipse 3: rich client platforms. A topic inherently connected to plugin development. Please give us a new version of this book.
Rating  - What I would expect if there was NO docs for eclipse
I don't like this book as a book on writing plugins for eclipse for the following reasons:
1) This book's 'exploratory' approach tries to show you how to search (the hack approach) through the installed plugins for excerpts that you can copy/paste/edit. It would have been more useful if the authors used a 'tutorial' approach that constrains the example to documented basics (many different examples that then integrate/or not).
2) As expected (and tiring if you have other book from these authors), JUnit integration is the example developed throughout the book. This may satisfy the need for some types of plugins (code oriented plugins), but leaves much to be desired if you want to develop other kinds of tools.
3) The samples are outdated in 3.0, and the main example won't work/run in 3.0 (even if you download their project source). If you try to follow along, you will quickly be disapointed once you run into that snag. I am sure that under 2.x it works great.
4) This book is useful as a way of seeing a small example built up. However, because of #3, this all becomes useless once the plugin doesn't 'work'.
As with most books that cook a long example as a way of teaching, rather than as a way to support other knowledge, much of the time is spent on explaining how to cook things for the example. For me this doesn't work, as I want something focused that instructs me, rather than a evolving code-walkthrough of a particular example. To me this is boring, and has no use after the initial read.
This book would be great if it was 1/2 as long, and focused on the patterns for the plugins instead, not presume to be an intro to plugin development.
Rating - Different is good
"Contributing to Eclipse" is a great read. More importantly, as someone who is in the middle of their first major Eclipse plugin development project, I learned a lot -- even though I've previously read every other available book on the topic. Gamma and Beck take you through the development of a fairly sophisticated plugin, step by step. Perhaps most welcome, the plugin they develop isn't a syntax-highlighting text editor (an example that's already been done to death,) but a set of tools for running JUnit tests on Java code!
This is the only book I've seen that discusses testing and Test-Driven Development of plugins, a must for serious plugin developers. As you'd expect from the developers of JUnit, they use JUnit to test every piece of functionality they add. Surprisingly, even though you'd expect some confusing in writing about using JUnit to test a JUnit plugin, there's none. Gamma and Beck are both excellent writers, and they know this subject matter inside out.
A word of warning: this is neither an introduction to nor a reference for Eclipse plugin programming. I don't think I would have gotten nearly as much from this book if I hadn't read "Eclipse in Action" and "The Java Programmer's Guide to Eclipse" first. But if you've gotten beyond the novice level with Eclipse, I guarantee you'll learn something by reading this book.
Rating - Zen and the Art of Eclipse
Once you get past the interesting writing style, this is a pretty cool book written by two of the giants in the industry. This is a particularly good book, if you are interested in Eclipse plugin development and JUnit testing. The tutorial is pretty comprehensive and the book example evolves in a natural way. The only downside is that this book is targeted at Eclipse 2.1 rather than 3.0 (which is no wonder given that it predates 3.0 by more than six months). This doesn't really detract from the book because most of the examples are fairly generic and can be made to run in Eclipse 3.0 with minimal effort.
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