Excellent past performance from O'Reilly raises the expectations to ever higher levels. Unfortunately this one does not deliver the to promise on its cover. Mine says Coverage of 3.0, but it is all about version 2 with a preview chapter on 3.0.
Major gripes:
Contrary to the excellent Tomcat, the definitive guide, this book hasn't heard about Mac OSX.
No specific instructions covering every major OS.
No detailed explanations about 'every' way to connect to a CVS server, covering all of pserver, ext and extssh. Setting up to a CVS server with certificates instead of passwords, etc.
No coverage of installing java code compressors and obfuscators, available as eclipse plugins.
The v4all plugin mentioned seems to be on a dead end with one developer only.
No quick tips on setting up Ant to do everything after compile, (I do have that title as well, ;-) )
I'm halfway through, but doubt the disappointment will go away. This is a first printing, stating as date April 2004. Eclipse 3.0 is available much longer than that...
But maybe I looked at the banner saying 'coverage of 3.0' and missed that lacked the the more important tag line: 'The Definitive Guide'. This is not the definitive guide, but Steve Holzner and O'Reilly should publish as soon as possible. The platform IDE definitively merits that attention.
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