Welcome to Eclipse, today's premiere Java™ Integrated development environment (IDE). Eclipse is an extraordinary tool, and it fills a long-standing need among Java developers—no longer do you have to suffer through pages of errors scrolling off the screen while using command-line Java compilers. Now you've got an IDE that will handle the details for you, letting you get on with writing code. If you've never used Eclipse before, your productivity is about to take a giant jump.

We're going to push the Eclipse envelope in this book, working from the basics up through the advanced. This book has been designed to open up Eclipse and to be more accessible than any other. It's a programmer-to-programmer book, written to bring you up to speed in Eclipse without wasting time.

If you're a programmer, this book is written to give you exactly what you want to see—the good stuff, and only the good stuff. There's as much Eclipse crammed into this book as you need to master the topic, and mastering Eclipse is our goal.