eclipse and me

ok so im talking to my software engineering prof and hes doing research with motorola and uses eclipse.
he suggested i look into eclipse as an alternative IDE. before i start my search, i always ask sharky's peeps for advice.
right now im doin my undergrad in CS, already did c++,c did data structures, currently taking database structures and formal languages,next semester will be doing java, operating systems, and prolly unix programming.

can u guys give me some insight about eclipse, how it generally works, its pros and cons compared to visual studio, where i can look to get it (open source right) and helpful tutorials for noobs like me. thnx in advance:)
also would like tutorials for noobs for linux, i interested in that too!

Lots of people use Eclipse as a Java IDE.

Well Eclipse is not really an IDE, it's a platform that you can use to build IDE's for any language, except that the core Eclipse platform has a basic Java IDE "built-in".

Essentially, the eclipse you download is a bare-bones Java IDE, you then add to this by downloading and installing Eclipse Plugins, which add functionality.

This gives it an exceptional level of extensibility, I mean when you install Visual Studio - that's it, the entire functionality is there and you can't really add any more, but with Eclipse, you can add new stuff to it all the time.

IBM's WebSphere Application Developer 5.0 is essentially Eclipse + a lot of IBM plugins (and when I say a lot, I mean a huge amount).

There's also a plugin development API that you can download so that you can write your own plugins if the existing ones don't ring your bell.

I use eclipse as a professional Java developer, I like it a lot.

www.eclipse.org

I personally have had a difficult time finding enough documentation for Eclipse. I picked up NetBeans and was proficient in a half day. Same with Visual Studio 2003. But Eclipse has always had the sledge-hammer feel -- way too powerful, and thus way too confusing.

Recently, I've tried it again and now it does ship with some tutorial type documentation that helps a lot. But to get the nice parts, you still need to dig through a bunch of plug-ins.

As a result, all my .NET work is done in VS, but all my Java work is done in a text editor and command line. For the size of projects I write, it'll take me longer to learn the IDE than to code it up.