Whirlwind tour of Eclipse?

Question

Does anyone know of a whirlwind tour of Eclipse that would help a (former) Visual Studio user get up to speed with it?

I just want something that tells me where all the basic features are and what all the cool stuff I've heard so much about is?

So far I've been using it mostly as a text editor and have had some luck compiling and running programs in it. But... I'm a bit confused, for instance sometimes I can't seem to get out of debug mode.

I'me sure I'm just looking in the wrong places for everything as I'm used to a different interface.

Are there plugins for Eclipse that make it look and feel more like Visual Studio?

I'm using Europa at the moment because thats what the rest of my team use, howver I'm more than happy to migrate to Ganemede...

Answer 1

Try Help -> Help Contents (no joke) and read the Workbench User Guide:

Especially the Chapter Concepts.

The same chapter is also very well in the Java Development User Guide

I'm sure after reading these few pages, you'll already know more then the average Eclipse user (because needs Help this days?).

Answer 2

Try http://help.eclipse.org/help32/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user/concepts/welcome.htm if you can't access the help directly from Eclipse.

Also IBM have an Introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio users (although I've never used visual studio so I can't gauge it's usefulness).