Section 10.7. Resources

10.7. Resources

NetBeans. NetBeans has some very extensive online help. There are also some very good Web-based documents, including the user guide which can be found at http://usersguide.netbeans.org/. Of particular value is the Getting Work Done guide at http://usersguide.netbeans.org/gwd/ which describes itself as "a more detailed introduction to the IDE than available in the Getting Started tutorial."

Support for NetBeans, as with many other Open Source projects, happens online. There is no toll-free number to call. Instead you subscribe to an e-mail list; all messages sent to the list are then forwarded to everyone on the list. Anyone can respond, and you are encouraged to respond too, to share what you know with others. The NetBeans developers are often the ones who answer the most difficult questions, but lots of times answers come from others who have just made it a little further up the learning curve than you.

To subscribe to the nbusers list, send e-mail to [e-mail]. You might want to create a special mail folder for the constant stream of messages that you'll get from nbusers. We've seen about 1520 messages per day, on average, over the past year. You don't need to read them all, but as you scan the subject lines, see if there are ones that you might be able to answer. If you want others to reply to your requests for help, it would only be fair for you to do likewise. For a directory of the many e-mail lists related to NetBeans, go to http://www.netbeans.org/community/lists/.

Eclipse. The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse by Sherry Shavor et al. (ISBN 0321159640, from Addison-Wesley Professional) is an excellent book on the Eclipse platform, particularly from (as the title suggests) the Java developer's point of view. Eclipse is, however, more than just Java. It is designed to be an "IDE Factory," providing a framework for almost any task that involves an edit/compile/deploy kind of lifecycle.