Getting started with IntelliJ IDEA

I found this book minimally useful for the price. Most of IntelliJ information in the book was what I had already found by basically fumbling with the IDE on my own for a short time, and found nothing in the book that increased my ability to use the IDE, except maybe (an incomplete) printed list of short cut keys. A total of four pages were used to describe Window elements and Editor elements, the aspects I was expecting to be the main ingredients of such a book. The meatier aspects of this fairly sparse book actually dwells on Database work and web development, which I do not do so much of, so on that respect I cannot comment. If you are a java developer, there's not much in it for you. The author does add a small chapter near the end on desktop development, but uses a form builder for AWT/Swing as a core element, and again very sparse. Frankly I feel I am probably not alone as one changing IDEs, I am also anxious to move on to JavaFX/Scenebuilder, which this book has no reference to.

I downloaded the free sample chapter, and I was appalled at how poor the author's English is. When one embarks on writing a book in a language one has no complete mastery of, one should consider hiring a professional technical writer. Shame on the publisher, too.

If you’re looking for a resource to help you navigate and understand the IntelliJ interface, and are looking for a good reference based on the topics you can see in the table of contents, you’ll find this book helpful. It’s very thorough, and also gives you some information for adapting to IntelliJ if you are coming from a different IDE. But the book will be more helpful to you if you’re looking for more information on the topics it covers in each chapter, as opposed to trying to read it straight through.