A Good Book And Some Internet Resources

[Asha Jagannathan]

Could you please suggest some good internet resources and a good book for Eclipse and for performance tuning of Websphere Application Developer.

[Edited by Jeanne - please don't post the subject in all caps in the future]
[ June 23, 2004: Message edited by: Jeanne Boyarsky ]

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by Asha Jagannathan:
Could you please suggest some good internet resources and a good book for Eclipse and for performance tuning of Websphere Application Developer.

The main online resource would be http://www.eclipse.org

As for a book, People usually recommend Eclipse in Action from Manning, but if you are always following and wanting to be up-to-date with the newest Eclipse, you might be interested in Eclipse Live from SourceBeat... If you are participating in this forum this week, you have chance to win one copy of Eclipse as well...

But I'm not quite sure about the performance Tuning of Websphere Application Developer..

[David Bridgewater]

There's a recent book from O'Reilly (Steve Holzner, April 2004) simply called 'Eclipse'. I leafed through it in a bookshop recently.

It has plenty of decent coverage of all the basic features (and some not so basic), and has a chapter at the end on release 3.0.

URL on O'Reilly site:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/eclipse/toc.html

amazon.com page... reviews are interesting - mainly positive, but a common theme is that the book is more for folk new to Eclipse rather than seasoned experts.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006411/qid=1087977628/sr=8-3/ref=pd_ka_3/103-1020039-3572635?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

HTH -

David.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Personally I've always held the opinion that if you NEED a book to work with an IDE that IDE is too complex.

Now, that doesn't mean a book or manual describing little used features that most people rarely if ever use can't be helpful.

[David Bridgewater]

Asha... a question for you... on the WebSphere Application Developer performance question.

Are you interested in the performance of the IDE itself, or are you meaning "how do I use Application Developer to measure/profile the performance of applications (usually J2EE applications) which I write?"

On the performance of the IDE itself - I've not seen any resources. I had issues with version 4.0 which arbitrarily kept rebuilding entire projects even when there was no logical reason to do so (I had to turn the auto-compile off, which was a pain in itself). This issue has gone away (for me at least) in version 5.0/5.1.

On profiling your own applications - there's the Profiling Tool built into Application Developer. I've found the online help pretty good on this. There are some useful looking articles in "WebSphere Advisor" and "WebSphere Developer's Journal" - at least, judging by the titles - unfortunately, these are paid-for subscription magazines.

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:
Personally I've always held the opinion that if you NEED a book to work with an IDE that IDE is too complex.

Do u mean kinda JBuilder and WebSphere Studio? They got full of documents with their software in the box... My company is using JBuilder for years and the documents coming along with JBuilder are enough as for reference..... No other books are needed for the J2EE developement.... But I do belive that books specific on JBuilder might give some tips and tricks about the IDE...

Just my 2 cents...:0

[Jeroen Wenting]

Originally posted by Ko Ko Naing:


Do u mean kinda JBuilder and WebSphere Studio? They got full of documents with their software in the box... My company is using JBuilder for years and the documents coming along with JBuilder are enough as for reference..... No other books are needed for the J2EE developement.... But I do belive that books specific on JBuilder might give some tips and tricks about the IDE...

Just my 2 cents...:0

yes, they have documentation.
But even without reading it (or at least most of it, the quickstart guide is handy) you can use 90% of the more commonly used features.

The bulk of the JBuilder docs for version 4 (the last I had the money for) were mainly about how to use the dataaware Swing controlset to create client/server applications for example, something I never use because I work exclusively on web applications
The rest comprised a manual for Interbase, one for JDatastore, a nice API poster, and a Java tutorial.
The Interbase manuals came in handy when we sold a web app based on Firebird to a customer, the rest I never even looked at (hey, I work in IT. I write manuals, why should I read them ).

[Bill Dudney]

Originally posted by Ko Ko Naing:
[QB]
As for a book, People usually recommend Eclipse in Action from Manning, but if you are always following and wanting to be up-to-date with the newest Eclipse, you might be interested in Eclipse Live from SourceBeat... If you are participating in this forum this week, you have chance to win one copy of Eclipse as well...
[QB]

Well I am a bit biased You don't have to want to keep up with the latest and greatest Eclipse to get a lot of benifit from the Eclipse Live title (or any other SB title for that matter). If you notice a typo in the EiA title what do you do, ignore it because nothing can be done. Not that serious but can be annoying. Now what do you do if you notice something wrong in a paper book, not a simple typo but something really wrong with one of the examples. Again there is nothing that can be done. The publisher has probably printed all the copies of that book that will ever be printed.

In the SB model though if you notice a bug in an example you can email the author (me for example ) and I'll fix it. The book will be updated on the site and you and everyone else that has a subscription will have a better book because of it.

Eclipse 3 Live will be focused on Eclipse 3 forever. However the current list of 8 chapters (soon to be 9) grows over time based on reader feedback. The book went '1.0' back in March wihtout the refactoring chapters. As far as I know mine is the only book to cover refactorings exaustively. The decision to add refactorings was made based on reader feedback.

So there is more to the SB model than might first be apparent. You don't have to be one of the people that is constantly upgrading your Eclipse installation for the book to be useful. The reason I talk up that aspect so much is the book went 1.0 when 3.0 M7 shiped. I have been able to keep the book fresh with the latest 3.0 milestone builds because of the SB model.

In contrast it takes between 2 and 4 months for a traditional publisher to take a final manuscript and get it on paper and out to Barnes & Noble.

Hope this helps!