When you are finished with this book, you won't have a complete map of Eclipse, but you'll know at least one place to get each of your basic needs met. You will also know the rules through which you can play well with others. It's as if we draw you a map of Bangkok marked with six streets, a restaurant, and a hotel. You won't know everything, but you'll know enough to survive, and enough to learn more.

When you learn Eclipse, you'll spend much more time reading code than writing code. You will have to grow accustomed to incredibly productive days in which you spend six hours reading and one hour typing. After you become familiar with Eclipse culture, you'll "just know" how to solve more and more problems. However, you'll always solve problems by copying the structure of solutions to similar problems, whether by mimicking Eclipse structure or the structure of your own previous efforts.

As we walk together through our example, we won't pretend that we perfectly remember all the details. Instead, we'll show you how we found structure to mimic. Learning to effectively use Eclipse's search facilities is part of becoming an Eclipse contributor.

This book is not intended for beginners just learning to use Eclipse. We assume a familiarity with the vocabulary of Eclipse—views, editors, and so on. Once you've used Eclipse for a while, you are likely to come up with ideas for extending it. That's when this book comes into play.