Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns and Plugins (Eclipse Series) [Paperback]

This book encourages tool building by laying bare the design of an excellent tool platform, Eclipse, and encourages design by building a typical tool extending Eclipse. This tutorial on creating custom tools also provides an explanation of a highly effective software design philosophy. The authors revive the lost art of supporting existing work by building tools. This book improves the software developers skill set by building little tools, and gradually growing those tools into better-than-professional quality products to help a whole community of developers. This book revives that highly-effective practice of tool writing and provides lessons along the way that tool building and design are two of the most leveraged skills for software developers.

"Even long-time Eclipse committers will be surprised by the breadth and depth of this book. A must-read for every new Eclipse extender."

--Andre Weinand, Eclipse Committer

Contributing to Eclipse offers

• A quick step-by-step tutorial. Have your first plug-in running in less than an hour.
• An introduction to test-driven plug-in development. Confidently create higher quality plug-ins.
• The Rules of Eclipse. Seamlessly integrate your contributions with the rest of Eclipse.
• A design pattern tour of Eclipse. A cook's tour of Eclipse with patterns.
• A comprehensive tutorial. See all the techniques necessary to write production-quality contributions.

Erich Gamma and Kent Beck introduce you quickly, yet thoroughly, to Eclipse, the emerging environment for software development. Instead of simply walking you through the actions you should take, Contributing to Eclipse, with its many sidebars, essays, and forward pointers, guides you through Eclipse. You will not just do. You will also understand.

Whether you need to get up to speed immediately or want to better understand the design rationale behind Eclipse, Contributing to Eclipse is the Eclipse resource for you.

Kent Beck consistently challenges software engineering dogma, promoting ideas like patterns, test-driven development, and Extreme Programming. Currently affiliated with Three Rivers Institute and Agitar Software, he is the author of many Addison-Wesley titles.