I would like a recommendation for a book on Eclipse's Rich Client Platform (RCP).

Question

I have read through several reviews on Amazon and some books seem outdated.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. Thanks in advance. Bruce

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

I read the book suggested by Thomas and it's really worth reading, although not very up-to-date.

Answer 3

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 It's probably a little outdated now, but is very thorough and really explains how the Eclipse framework works.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.

Answer 4

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Java(TM) Applications" and would also add "Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins" to the list of rather outdated but still somewhat useful books on Eclipse RCP.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.

Answer 5

Recently published:

The third edition of "eclipse Plug-ins" by Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel

Practical Eclipse rich Client Platform Projects by Vladimir Silvar=1-1