Customer Reviews

Professional Java User Interfaces

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I was looking for a good book to describe architectural problem and solutions in UI building, as opposed to ones that simply go through the details of a particular UI technology. Unfortunately, this is not it. It's so bad I couldn't even finish reading it: I struggled through a third of it (hoping it would get better), skimmed the rest and finally gave up. I read almost 300 pages and didn't learn anything significant.

It gives overviews but does not enter in depth of anything. Architectural discussions are the worst as they go little beyond showing diagrams with boxes, with far not enough information to understand how to implement. For example, MVC discussion is just about 5 pages, it tells you what the 3 elements are, but it does not tell you why is good (or not), how to use it properly, talk about common misuses. Perhaps it's good for a very very junior person, just to get familiar with at least some terminology and references.

The prose also shows his preferences on specific technologies, which would be fine but I think it impedes objectivity. For example, he claims SWT having better performance than Swing, while it's known that that's not the case on Unix. All comments on performance are out of date anyway, but this was not accurate at the time of writing ( [...]). This unfortunately casts doubts on the rest...

The thing that gets me the most, is that the author clearly has a ton of experience, he _could_ have written a useful book. This one I found useless.

Basically a good book, although I wish there were more code examples explained in the book rather than provided on the author's website.