Getting started with Eclipse

Many companies have started adopting Eclipse as the default IDE for application development. In fact Eclipse has become so popular that the once popular Borland JBuilder and Weblogic Workshop have also been ported to use the Eclipse Platform.

With this there are more and more user getting introduced/started to/on Eclipse. At first the IDE might be confusing with features like “Build Automatically” etc. I have seen in many forums where users complain of not able to get started on using Eclipse for their day to day development activities.

The official Eclipse site should have been a place to find information; However its not, even after many revamps, I still feel that Eclipse.org is one of the most user un-friendly web site out there. There is more trouble when it comes to categorization/organization of content in the site.

The first thing I would recommend to any new Eclipse User is to use the Cheat Sheets ! When you start Eclipse, the Welcome page does have a link to the Cheat Sheets. (You can access the Welcome page via the Help Menu)

However not all the Cheat Sheets are displayed on the above welcome page. It only shows the Cheat Sheets which are part of the default Eclipse SDK. Many of Eclipse Projects like EMF etc contribute Cheat Sheets and this can be accessed via the Help Menu.

Cheat Sheets are a great way to get started on using a feature.

Note: If you are plug-in developer and want to build cheat sheets have a look at this article

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecl-cheatsheets/index.html

Following are the other places where you can find more information on Eclipse

• Eclipse Online Documentation - The same content can be viewed even from within Eclipse IDE (Help -> Help Contents). If the Help was available in PDF format, it would have been a nice add-on.
• Eclipse Articles
• Eclipse Newsgroups
• IBM Developer Works - There are some high quality Eclipse article on Developer Works
• EclipseCon - The Eclipse Conference is held every year and each year there are some high quality presentations delivered via various Eclipse Contributors and committers. Some or I should say most of the presentations are available to the public in PDF format. Dig through the sessions of EclipseCon 2007, EclipseCon 2006, EclipseCon 2005 and EclipseCon 2004

Where else can I go ?

There are lots of Blogs giving useful insight into Eclipse, few of which are written by Eclipse Committers. Few of them are listed on the sidebar of this page.

• Official Eclipse Blog
• Planet Eclipse is one site which covers the work and lives of Eclipse hackers and contributors.
• EclipseZone is another quality site providing useful Eclipse Tips and Tricks and articles on Eclipse features. The forum is also powerful in the sense that you get good responses to the problems/issues raised.
• Do keep a tab on Dzone as well for some good posts on Eclipse: http://www.dzone.com/links/tag/eclipse.html

If you use a RSS reader, I would recommend to add the RSS/Atom feeds of all the above sites. And last but not least, do subscribe to Eclipsetips.com feed as well

Popularity: 55%