Book review: Zend Studio for Eclipse - Developer's Guide


Book: Zend Studio for Eclipse, Developer's Guide
Authors: Peter MacIntyre and Ian Morse
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pearson Education

Description
Zend Studio for Eclipse, Developer's Guide from Addison-Wesley Pearson Education is a guide to Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSE) for intermediate to advanced developers.

The book has 18 chapters, with the first 16 covering the different views and preference settings for each specific task. The first 5 chapters are explaining basically the layout of the Eclipse working environment, with a focus on how to modify these views for your own benefit. The last 2 chapters are devoted to working out an example application using ZSE with Zend Framework.

Personal opinion
This book is in my opinion a beginner's guide into using ZSE, aiming at PHP developers that have a knowledge of general concepts like versioning, debugging and refactoring. I personally was hoping to see advanced settings to tune the IDE into a powerful developer's tool, but it was merely a basic explanation with the correct terminology for a product that I've been using well over two years now (yes, I was also beta-tester for it).

Conclusion
If you're new to Eclipse in general and specifically Zend Studio for Eclipse, I believe this book is going to be a valuable asset. It will not only give you insight in how the Eclipse IDE works, but it shows you also the possibilities to turn this into a very powerful tool for building PHP applications.

But if you're already a ZSE veteran I'd have to advice not to buy this book since it has no extra value then to explain the settings/views you've been using all along.

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