Customer Reviews

Up to Speed with Swing

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I read all the reviews and thought this book would provide a good reference on Swing. While it does introduce developers to Swing, I've subsequently found that it glosses over or fails to cover topics that are important once you start developing with Swing.

For example, the book barely touches on layout managers. But an understanding of layout managers is essential to development of a good UI via Swing. The book also has no/minimal coverage of areas such as text selection and carets. I suspect that there are other areas not mentioned but I haven't proceeded far enough with Swing to recognize what else is missing.

With hindsight, I wish that I'd bought the Java Swing book published by O'Reilly.

I have done quiet a bit of research on the net before I ordered this book, just so I get the best one. It looked just the book for me to start learning Swing. (I know Java already). When I looked through the book I was shocked to see that it was little more than a doorstop. Gutz is one of those few gifted individuals who really knows what he's talking about. BUT doesn't know how to explain it clearly. Apart from his coding style and the last two chapters this book rushes through every aspect of swing with very little to say about all parts of Swing. If you are looking for a book that will REALLY help you learn Swing, I recommend you take your hard earned cash elsewhere. I am returning it. And make a decision probably between the Sun's tutorial and Matthew Robinson's Swing book.

My copy has a little different cover, says "2nd edition", and is copyright 2000, but I couldn't find an exact match on Amazon.

The book is a good introduction to Swing, getting this Java programmer started fairly quickly. One thing that's appreciated for this server side Java programmer with no previous familiarity with AWT is the brief section reviewing AWT - which you unfortunately also have to know to use Swing, it seems.

That said, you run into the limits of the book rather quickly. There's a lot of detail on how to use each component, but very little on how to use it well. Coverage of layouts and events, both critical to building a good UI, is sketchy.

Also, there's no real reference section. Even just a brief listing of all the relevant classes and their methods would be really nice - say, similar to the reference section of David Flanagan's classic "Java in a Nutshell".

Finally, the author seems to be somewhat Windows centric, which is a little unfortunate since the main reason to use Swing is to produce a cross platform product.

I'm an experienced Window GUI programmer who switched to Java couple of weeks ago. Within a week, this book really guide me "up to speed" to swing as it promises. In real world, you want to absorb core concept & examples as soon as possible and pick up real stuff while coding based on them. I couldn't find any significant "neat" tricks from "Core JFC"(which is thick enough to please some people) and this is not a ref anyway. Org & examples are neat and Guts knows how to get to the point without wasting your time. One of the best considering the current status of swing itself.

Upto speed with Swing by Steven Gutz is really a fast track to most advanced GUI , the SWING. The author covered all features of the SWING. The book is very interesting to read and complete with working examples. All the chapters are organized and well written. It defenitely a needed book to learn things fast and work with, rather than voluminous and time consuiming books. I recommend this book for beginner/ intermediate level of java programmers. Thanks for Steven Gutz for his efforts to put the java programmers on fast track!!!

this is one fo the really good books on Swing. Nevermind ath it's slightly out of date..the writing here is very very high quality nad you'll come away with a great foundation. His "useful groupsings" of methods together into meaningful categories is so much better than the API dumps a lot of other books are...

I have other swing books but this was the first one out and it is the best book at keeping you in tune with gui development. The other books I have are great once you spend tons of time with them but are so detail oriented that its frustrating. This book was good when I needed to learn and its also good to look at because it has user interface design tips. I think interface design is also an art and shouldnt be treated as such a science. This book gives good suggestions at how to make the interface nicer for average users. The only complaint I have is that it is out of date for JDK1.2 but since another edition is coming out I will buy that one.

This book is great for people like me who are just getting started with Swing. I recommend it highly if you know awt but now want to stay with the times and use Swing.

For an experienced Java developer programming with the AWT components, this book is a quick reference to get you started using the Swing components. It 's light reading but gives you enough detail to understand the basic concepts and components in Swing.

Once you've read through the entire book you'll have no problem transitioning to the Swing components. The code samples are simple and straight-forward, although not very useful when looking for more complicated, practical, real-life examples, but it's a start in the right direction. The book was one of the first Swing references released.

Definitely worth the money!

The swing tutorial has a bunch of place holders in the JTree section. This book helped me figure out what I was missing when I needed it. I also liked the overview of the Swing classes