Looking for links to good information for Eclipse beginners. I've been a c# developer for sometime and I feel like I'm swimming in molasses. I'm especially interested in anything like the snippets functionality and how to use it (for example the prop snippet to create a property)
Hi, welcome to Eclipse!
I'd recommend you start with the tutorials on the "Welcome" screen (automatically shown on first launch, or via Help menu).
After that, a lot of stuff can be discovered by poking around. The built-in help is also quite good, and failing that, just google for it.
Set yourself some goal, and do a bit of research; I've found most stuff fairly easily that way.
As for snippets: I'm not terribly familiar with VS, but I gather they are basically code templates that you can insert and then fill in.
In Eclipse, that would be auto-complete (or "Content Assist"), triggered by Ctrl-Space. Just try it, it's fairly clever. It will offer completions of variable names, functions etc., but will also offer common snippets like creating constructors, public methods etc. E.g. type "public ctrl-spc", and it should offer a template for a public method (try ctrl-space several times to cycle through proposals).
You can also create your own auto-complete code snippets. These are called templates in Eclipse, to be found in the prefs under "Java / Editor / Templatest". Templates can be triggerd in auto-complete by typing the (beginning) of the template's name, then auto-completing.
Have fun!
Besides the very good Eclipse tutorials and documentation sleske mentioned here are some other good tutorials and introductions:
- IBM tutorial for Visual Studio users - you have to register for reading this tutorial but registration is free and you can download a bunch of really good Eclipse materials
- Effective Eclipse - Custom Templates - this article shows you Eclipse's "snippets funcionality" in details