» Java Swing, Second Edition

Java Swing, Second Edition Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Very Informative -- A desktop quick reference
Comment: This book does a very good job of consolidating all of the information regarding Swing that can be found on the internet and putting it into one book. Just be sure to note that it is HUGE.

It contains many interesting code examples and pictures. It takes every JObject (such as JLabel, JFrame, JTable) and compares what they would look like among different look and feels.

I highly reccomend it for any Java desktop programmer.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Encyclopedic tome on Swing is a great reference
Comment: This extremely hefty book on Swing has just about everything in it. However, it is intended to be a reference on Swing, not a tutorial. The problem with the Java Swing API is that it is so large and unwieldy itself that it is difficult to write a complete and useful reference that does not reflect that fact. If you need a good tutorial on Java Swing, you might want to look at the Core Java books by Cornell and read the chapters that apply to Swing. Cornell manages to carve out the basics of writing a Swing application very clearly without getting wrapped around the axle in details you do not need if you are a beginner. Then, come back to this book when you need to write an application to get the details you need. Since everything in Swing is a JavaBean, much of each component's behavior is controlled by a set of properties that are manipulated by accessor methods. Thus, this book has a table for each class that presents the class properties, the data type for each property, the accessor methods, and the default values. In addition, the book has plenty of demonstration code that shows how to use just about all of the various Swing components. The book even has chapters dedicated to changing the look and feel of components and also repainting issues, which loom large in Swing. You can download all of the book's code from the book's website at O'Reilly and Associates. I highly recommend this book to anyone who already knows the bare basics of writing applications with Swing and needs a useful reference. There is no better one out there in publication of which I am aware.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Book With a Bad Title
Comment: This is for people who have a working knowledge of Swing and who want a comprehensive reference on their desks. I am preparing for the java Developer exam and thought this would help me get up to speed with Swing. But this is an over kill. Trying to learn Swing with this book is like trying to open a can of Coke with a bulldozer. It would have been more helpful if the Title was something like 'Swing Reference'. If you want to learn some Swing to get some work done very quickly stay away. If you are in the Guru class then go for it. 4 stars because it is indeed a well written reference (Juding from Chapter 1 and 3 and some skimming) But not 5 stars because the Title is misleading

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Customer Rating:
Summary: yikes!!
Comment: I can't recall a tech book so thoroughly unreadable! Maybe if I was more well versed in Swing this might make a little more sense, but seriously....it's great that these folks know all the inheritance lines and can spit them out in eight words or less, but seriously...imagine this as a classroom lecture..anybody awake? anybody still here? well, this class inherits from that or this implemements that interface, and if you look closely, you'll see how this references what we said 47 pages ago (or better yet, what we're gonna say 36 pages down the road!)...all well and good...but we're trying to write real programs and solve real problems....c'mon guys, we're not experts here, else we wouldn't be buying the book!! how about a litle real world usage...I don't have to time to check out the API docs to try and figure out what these guys are yakking about...a major disappointment.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretty Thorough Reference
Comment: Man, has Swing grown; no wonder it took 5 authors to write this book! Anyway, they do a good job describing a very complex subject. The text is definitely more of a reference than a tutorial, but if that's what you're looking for then definitely check out this book...
*IF* you have another source for layout managers. Other reviewers have pointed this out as well. In my opinion, this topic deserves its own chapter because every time you put a component in a container you have to be aware of its layout manager. And when a dialog box gets complicated, as they are wont to do, you have layout managers dealing with each other ad infinitum - and that is precisely when you really need to understand how they work so you can make sense of what is going on when you resize something.

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