I have read through several reviews on Amazon and some books seem outdated. I am currently using MyEclipse 6.5 which is using Eclipse 3.3. I'm interested in hearing from people that have experience learning RCP and what reference material they used to get started.
I would like a recommendation for a book on Eclipse's Rich Client Platform (RCP)
I've been doing Eclipse RCP development for almost 2 years now. When I first started, I wanted a book for help and many people told me, with Eclipse you're better off using the Eclipsepedia and Google.
However, I started with "The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse" by D'Anjou et al, and I still reference it when I need a better starting point or a good reference. It's probably a little outdated now, but is very thorough and really explains how the Eclipse framework works. Like just about anything, RCP isn't too hard to pick up if you've figured out how the framework supporting it works and you'll get a lot more mileage out of your code.
I agree with Thomas Owens on "Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications" and would also add "Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins" to the list of rather outdated but still somewhat useful books on Eclipse RCP. Even though the latter does not go much into the Rich Client Platform, it explains quite a lot about the Eclipse plug-in architecture that is useful knowledge for developers of RCP applications.
There has been a lot of improvements in the Eclipse RCP platform since the release of both of these books, so I really hope that there are new versions of these books coming out soon.
Although I don't have personal experience, a few friends of mine did Eclipse RCP development, and they used the book "Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications". They seemed to like it a lot, and I looked it at myself, and it seemed useful. If I was going to do RCP development on Eclipse, I would probably get this book.
To clarify - this book is geared toward Eclipse 3.1, and since I haven't done any RCP development of my own, I'm not sure how much things have changed.
I find a lot of the books to be lacking in any sort of depth. At least not enough to justify their price. You can find plenty of tutorials online that cover what the books do and plenty more. They're usually less outdated than the books too.
I really like Lars Vogel's tutorials: http://www.vogella.com/eclipse.html
They're short and easy to understand, with enough pictures and material to get you going. After you have a basic understanding, then google will suffice for the details of things.
I read the book suggested by Thomas and it's really worth reading, although not very up-to-date.
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