Customer Reviews

Swing: A fast-paced guide with production-quality code examples

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Two years ago, the JavaRanch reviewer, Anmarie Ziegler, wrote this about the first edition: "Overall this is an excellent book, and I would recommend it for the intermediate to advanced Swing developer." The same can be said of the second edition of "Swing". This edition has been updated to bring it up to Java 1.4 with new examples, new components, and three new chapters. You should note that this book is not for beginners. If "threads", "anonymous classes", or "event handling" are foreign words to you then you should go over the basic Swing chapters in a Java intro book such as "Beginning Java 2" by Ivor Horton. If you consider yourself at least an intermediate Java programmer and are comfortable with the basics of the AWT and you want to learn Swing very well then you are ready for this book. The authors have written the Bible of Swing. This book covers not just the basics of Swing but goes beyond that to teach you how to build your own Swing components. The cover states that the book contains, "production quality code" and this is exactly what it contains. You will find no simple "Hello World" examples but instead demonstrations of how to make use of the real power of Swing. The coding samples you will find in this book are extremely detailed and well commented. If you want to learn how to be a competent Swing developer then you should get this book.

I read this book while buying O'Reilly's "Java Swing," mainly because I noticed that one of the authors of this book gave a glowing review of the O'Reilly book. Wonderful thing to occur, since I found this book very useful and unique.

True to the cover, it has "production quality" examples written in Swing, including an entire word processor in the section about JEditorPane. I am downloading the code at this moment to test it out. The presentation in this book for each chapter is roughly: Show a class' place in the Swing hierarchy, explain the concepts and useful methods, then iteratively develop an interesting application. These applications start out with simple features, then the next revision has another new feature.. and so forth.

Bugs encountered ARE REPORTED. That, along with the O'Reilly review I mentioned earlier, points to a good honesty. I have no problem commending them by paying for their book.

For beginners to Swing, I would recommend Sun's tutorial book on Swing (by Mary Campione). You can check it out for free and then perhaps buy it. You could also learn Swing from this book, but perhaps you would have more of a cut&paste understanding. Depends.

For those used to Swing, this book really files in the big gaping hole in Java's documentation: Good examples of little things being used. Cuts down on experimentation. I know from personal experience that Sun's jdk HTML renderer blows, but this book tells you that it does, and where to go to find out when it stops blowing so badly.

I found this book the best for intermediate to seasoned Swing developer. Excellent coverage on some Swing topics not covered in sufficient depth elsewhere - such as tables, trees and GridBagLayout. The book is considered a classic in Java Swing developers community and is highly recommended to anyone with some basic Swing understanding who wants to know it real well and use it. The code examples are quite practical, I used the concepts from the book several times in my projects.

Excellent treatment of this flexible GUI API presenting both basic and advanced usage of JFC Swing with great care. I especially like the way all examples are annotated and fully explained. I hope this book's source code style will be emulated in other publications! The book can also be regarded as an easy-to-follow reference for JFC Swing techniques. Every example is a complete application; this allows any snippet of code you pull out to be derived in context. I find this format ideal and it provides the convenient ability to skip around in any chapter to exactly what might be needed for a given task.

From my initial comments, you can tell I truly like and recommend this book. The only negatives I see right now are those last four chapters not being printed but only available on-line (I dislike this trend). Also, the book stressed Java 2 but it would have been nice to see them mention that 95% of the book applies to the JDK1.1.x with the JFC Swing extension (e.g. simply reference the single file swingall.jar); those examples will run with Java 1.1 unchanged.

One of the best book for understanding Swing components. I have had problems with rendering particularly with JList, JTree, and after eeading this book, everything seems so simple. The material is so unique that will be very helpful for serious Java/Swing programmers.

Before the first edition came out, I was very frustrated with the books available on the topic. The first edition was already the best book on Swing. While reviewing the manuscript for the second edition, I made up my mind to purchase the book as soon as it would be available. In a forward that he wrote for the book, James Gosling -creator of Java- gives credit to the authors for their excellent work.

Swing is a difficult topic, with many concepts that are a departure from more traditional Window MFC or Visual Basic GUI programming. This book does an excellent job at covering those concepts in simple terms, so that by the time the reader hits the first examples, he/she is already familiar with the general principles. I would have no problem recommending this book for people of all levels, as I believe they will all find some serious material to further their comprehension of Swing.

But do not think this book is a dry text book either, or a mere reprint of the voluminous Swing documentation. Once equiped with the general concepts of Swing (including an excellent coverage of thread safety in GUI applications), the authors embark on a methodical review of the Swing components, illustrating each with some real production grade code. No 10-line hello world in this book... but no verbose samples that have you wonder why the authors took an approach that you know would not survive the test of a production environment. No. The source code is excellent, documented, and accompanied with some detailed specific explainations when necessary (too many books have a long wordy reprint of the sample code in plain english that simply detracts from the essentials).

Everyone has a different style of learning. I find this book to be a good balance between the dry concepts and the concrete tips. Notes throughout the text highlight the differences between successive releases of Swing... a nice touch when you have to develop for multiple target platforms. As you progress in your understanding of Swing, you will find yourself going back to this book over and over again, looking for more details about the inner workings of Swing.

After browing through all the books and swing, I came across this book and after spending an hour reading it, I bought this book to use it in my project. I was totally new to SWING at that time. The project duration was just 2 weeks for development, I spend 4 days reading and trying out and next 4 days I finished the complete project. My users were so happy with the UI and the great look. It's all becuase of the great examples in the book. If you need to know something about Swing it is there. The best thing I like in this book is, first the explain the features in English and then with step by step examples. What else do you need? I would strongly recommand this book to anybody who is new to Swing and also to the experts for quick reference. Thank you very much authors and looking forward for your second edition soon.

This book allows one to quickly go from a Swing amateur to a very competent Swing programmer. The quality of the demo code is good, and more than just toy problems are tackled. I didn't give this book five stars because of the number of typos. While they generally don't detract from understanding the topic at hand, they are annoying.

While this is not a rank beginner book, I do believe it could be useful for someone who has gone through all of the Swing trails in the Java tutorial and written some basic GUI stuff. Before I got this book, the Java tutorial and the Javadoc was all I knew about Swing and I found this book quite digestible.

I highly recommend this book. I purchased it about 2 months after starting development of a Java-based GUI. This book paid for itself in the first week, based on the time I saved. It has excellent code examples that are well commented - each example has a section titled "Understanding the code" which explains exactly how each Swing component is used in the code. The sections on JTable and JList were the most valuable to me. I have modeled all of my tables on the examples in the book, and was able to write my own renderers to handle the unique data I was displaying in the tables (combination of icons and text). I have used this book more than any other on my shelf - it's well worth the price!

I thought I ought to point out that this book is not only for advanced programmers. I got "Swing" as a newcomer to programming, period, and have found the book perfectly accessible. I had a cursory experience of Swing from a general Java text, and was able to start right at the back of the book. The example code has saved me SO much time, and I know this book will always have the answers I need as my skills improve.

Do not be intimidated by the size or material in this book.