IntelliJ IDEA in Action: Covers IDEA v.5

This book is 10 years old now and honestly you shouldn't buy it as the latest IntelliJ is so different now that the book is almost useless. I bought it with higher expectations, but am now returning it.

This book has been good so far learn a lot about intellij that I could not learn on my own.

This book is pretty much a Help file in a printed form. No insights.

I switched to IntelliJ IDEA recently and switching tools is never an easy process. This book is very interesting for both beginners and experienced developers. The former will find everything they need to learn how to use an IDE and harness its power to become more productive. On the other hand, experienced developers will find a lot of information they are already aware of. Nevertheless, this book will prove to be useful to learn about all the features one would normally postpone the learning of because of time constraints during the day. It is also an excellent way to learn about smaller yet useful features that do not appear in the user interface. Given the time we spend in our IDE, I do think it's worth buying such a book, even to get only a few pieces of information. A few of these gems will save a lot of our time and sanity and that's the real value.

IntelliJ IDEA is the first Java IDE that is set up to think like a developer. It's function is to help with the initial writing and then the refactoring of code. The central point of its development has been to assist developers to code faster and increase productivity. IntelliJ IDEA is now in its fifth generation (and as always the next generation is in the works). The book isn't exactly a joint development between the authors and the developing vendor JetBrains, but it's close. It is an authorized production written with the cooperation, approval, and contributions of the development at JetBrains. At a superficial level IDEA can be just another editor with a few tools to facilitate rapid typing. Beyond that, however is a multitude of powerful tools to assist development. The book is organized in such a way that a beginner can start with how to install the program, or an experienced developer can quickly get to topics they need to understand more completely. So if you are a beginner or an advanced user, this is an excellent book and highly recommended.

I picked this book up since a lot of developers at the office are using IntelliJ IDEA. As of this posting, IDEA version 9 was just released. Even with this dated book, I was able to come up to speed pretty quickly on IDEA. A lot of this book covers the obvious, so some experienced developers will jump over big sections of the book. However, for a book on an IDE, this one is pretty good. Much of the features in IDEA remain intact, however there's an ever-growing bucket of new features and changes. This book primarily focuses on IDEA 4.0, with special sections on 5.0. With all the new additions since then, this book is quickly becoming out of date. Edited summer 2014. I demoted this a star since it is now way out of date, so I would not advise using this at all.