1. Everything is organized around "perspectives". A perspective is a set of views organized to help you perform a certain task. E.g. Java (coding), Debugging, C

1. Everything is organized around "perspectives". A perspective is a set of views organized to help you perform a certain task. E.g. Java (coding), Debugging, CVS, etc. You can customize any perspective as you see fit. I use Java and Debugging. They took me a while to get used to, but in the end it's a very helpful construct. Don't just make one huge 'everything' perspective. Instead throw them on hot keys (alt-1, alt-2) and just switch back and forth as needed. 2. The editor and other UI widgets (proj/file trees) provide a lot of information on the state of your world via various decorations. Example - you have a Java file open. It has compilation errors. Those errors will be highlighted in the "overview" margin. This shows as colored marks on the side of the editor. They are used to quickly navigate to different things. This specific example are called Annotations in eclipse parlance. The same decorations are provided at file and project level. So, at a glance you can see if project has errors and as you drill down, it's easy to locate which dir/package has errors, etc. 2a. If you put your cursor inside of a variable, type, etc it will highlight all instances/references of said thing in the overview margin. super handy. 2b. The same goes for CVS annotation (or more general "team" annotation). Even though this is buried in my list, it might be my favorite feature. You get line by line annotations (colored by age) and you can link this margin to a history window. Click on an annotation to see full history entry in window below. Killer. 3. Useful commands: CTRL-SHIFT-G (find occurences) and CTRL-t (open type), CTRL-r (open resource), CTRL-o (open field/method) and .... i forget the key sequence but the command to open class heirarchy. Those are my main ways to navigate. Open type/resource takes wildcards. Use them. 4. All of the above allows me to work with a reduce UI, sometimes, many times in full screen mode. 5. Understand that Eclipse uses it's own compiler. If you compile outside of Eclipse (ant), then those class files are thrown out and recompiled when eclipse is run again. You can get the eclipse compiler as standard jar and it works great with Ant and the like. If you have a mixed environment, then you def need to look into that.