Best Way to get up to speed on RCP Application Development

[arick]

I would appreciate suggestions on the best way for me to come up to speed effeciently on the best practices for:
1) RCP Application Development
2) RCP Application Deployment/Update
3) SWT Application Development

So far, I've gotten a relatively complex SWT application developed. I will be the first to admit that the code is in need of significant refactoring, or better yet, a total re-write. If I'm going to do a total re-write of the GUI, I am pretty well convinced that RCP Developer/SWT-Designer is the best way to go with this.

I went through the RCP tutorial that comes with Designer, and it was patentily obvious that without an emersion in RCP-specific development techniques, that the tool is relatively incomprehensible to me. To that end, I am looking for the best manual on RCP development so that I RTFM.

However, the two Eclipse books on RCP development, "Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications" and "Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins (2nd Edition)" are both 2-3 years old, and the Eclipse tooling has come a long way since then. I've heard rumour that the 3rd edition is due out shortly, but I can't find any estimates of when that is (other then "Sometime this year").

What would be your recommendations as to the best way to learn to RCP best practices and the best tools to get my application deployed?

NOTE: I am currently using JPA via Hibernate, and MyEclipse for the back-end.

[Eric Clayberg]

However, the two Eclipse books on RCP development, "Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications" and "Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins (2nd Edition)" are both 2-3 years old, and the Eclipse tooling has come a long way since then.

Not really. Both of those books are still extremely relevant and the two together should teach you everything you need to know.

I've heard rumour that the 3rd edition is due out shortly

The 3rd edition of the Plug-ins book is due out in a couple of months and will be targetted at Eclipse 3.4. The current 2nd edition which tragets Eclipse 3.2 can be used equally well with Eclipse 3.3.