Chapter 9. Help and Community

Welcome to the Eclipse community. Membership is free, and you've already taken the first steps by installing the software and reading this guide. To help you go further, online help, web sites, articles, and other resources are available to assist you, as are thousands of Eclipse enthusiasts from around the world.

Online Help

Eclipse provides an extensible online help system with details about the version of Eclipse you're using and any plug-ins you have installed. It can be searched and viewed in several different ways.

Getting Help

The most common way to view online help is to select Help → Help Contents. A separate Help window will open, showing several help topics. Expand the topics to hone in on the information you need, or enter a keyword in the Search field at the top of the window.

Another way to get help is with dynamic help. To use dynamic help, simply press F1 (or select Help → Dynamic Help) and an embedded Help view will appear. As your focus changes to different views and editors, the Help content is updated to show help for what you are doing at the moment. Select Help → Search Help… to find help topics relevant to the view you're currently in.

Help Topics

If you install the Eclipse SDK as detailed in Part I, you will find the following topics listed in the Help contents:

Workbench User Guide

Contains information on how to use the IDE in general, independent of your programming language.

Java Development User Guide

Discusses how to use ...

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