Customer Reviews

Programming with JFC

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm new to Swing and Java. This book provided alot of good examples to get me started with Swing and able to produce working programs quickly. My next book purchases will be books that do a better job describing the details of Swing and Java in general.

This book is a pretty thorough review of JFC and the individual components. Familiarity with AWT is recommended to cruise through this book though.

Programming with JFC focuses on the Swing component of the Java programming language. Swing is a toolkit that attempts to simplify and streamline the development of the windowing components, namely the visual components (such as menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, etc.) that are used in GUI-based programs. More information about Swing can be found at the Swing Connection home page at http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/index.html. If you are short on cash, you could glean the bulk of the information provided by this book from the free resources available on-line at the Swing Connection and save yourself nearly fifty dollars.

While Java itself allows programs to be written once for different platforms, Swing components can be designed in such a way that they will execute without modification on any kind of computer with the identical look and feel of the operating system.

As an example, when you create a program with Swing for Windows 95, it will have the look and feel of an application written specifically for Windows 95. When you run the same program under Solaris, it runs like an application written explicitly for Solaris.

Programming with JFC begins with an overview of Swing programming and Swing specific component. The authors detail the difference between what the Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) offers as opposed to the Swing-based model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. More precisely, Swing sits on top of a number of the AWT API's.

The majority of the book details the features set of Swing, from its user interface classes, to its controls and implementation. The authors start with simple controls before moving onto the more detailed issues of advanced controls such as trees and tables.

The book comes with a CD-ROM (naturally) that includes numerous examples, source code and a library of ready-to-use GUI components. Also, similar material is also available via Swing Connection.

Overall, the book provides an excellent introduction to JFC. While it is not a definitive or comprehensive guide to Swing, it does cover most of its important aspects.

There is a lot it barely goes into. Try to figure out how to get ComboBoxModel or data models in general to work by using this book. I am having a lot of difficulty with it.

I recommend another book. There is little here that is not available through documentation, online tutorials or examples that come with swing itself.

This book is a vast improvement over the very sparse Swing documentation. Reading it, I've learned a lot on how to work with the components. The writing style is pretty good and the many examples are helpful. However, if you're looking for a complete and authoritive reference on the Swing API, this is not it.

This book takes an fairly substantial Java graphics API and demonstrates the "How do I ...?" tasks a typical programmer needs to know to start using this new and expanded GUI API. The examples are targeted to the specific task at hand, but are complete running examples one can quickly expand and modify. JFC merges graphics concepts and ideas from many different opposing factions (windows, motif, IFC, Java AWT 1.1, ...) and the authors have done an excellent job explaining the motivation behind what we see in the final JFC implementation. The design sections ending most chapters also offer guidance on how to build elegant GUIs, rather than just throwing together a bunch of widgets because one "can".

I needed to use the online JFC documentation in conjunction with this book. That is great since I typically program using the online doc. This also helped reduce the size of the book so the text can focus on orienting and guiding me through the doc,! rather than the usual "core dump" many similar Java books deliver.

My only complaint is that the rudimentary graphics and minor typos in the text reflect what was probably a fairly rushed production job, which is par for the course lately for modern computer programming texts. The content of this book, however, reflects alot of deep consideration for the reader, in particular consideration for what a typical reader needs to experience and understand to get started programming with the JFC.

Overall, an excellent filter!

This book was extremely helpful getting me started with Swing. It makes the confusing APIs make sense!

Although this book covers all the Swing components it is only good enough for basic users. The examples are too simple to explain any itricacies involved in using the components. Most of the information are better explained in some excellent articles that are available at the Swing Connection. I wish there were better examples specifically for using Internal frames and how to use the property change listeners etc.

I would highly recommend this book as an introduction to Java's JFC. Although it does not contain a definitive guide to swing, it does an excellent job of convering many of the most important aspects. The one thing I found disappointing was the lack of coverage of the GridBagLayout (I would have given 5 stars).