The Definitive Guide to Java Swing, Third Edition (Definitive Guide)

Killer Game Programming in Java

Swing, Second Edition

Head First Design Patterns

Ajax in Action

Jfc And Swing

Swing Hacks (Hacks)

Format: Paperback
Author: Joshua Marinacci
ReleaseDate: 01 June, 2005
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Spruce up your Swing!
But the Swing library is difficult to absorb due to its size, and to tell the truth, the results I have seen with simple Swing were less than inspiring. The Swing library is what makes Java usable for most users; ask them to interact with a purely text interface, and they'll look at you like you grew a set of antennae.

Swing Hacks takes this to the next level, showing how to make your interfaces shine. It does assume a fairly good understanding of Swing, so no newbies should get this imagining they'll be Swing gurus in no time. But learning Swing, and then applying the hacks in this book, you'll set yourself apart from the rest of the bunch.

Some dubious hacks.
The auto-completion class here is worthless, more of a bare starting place to mabye make something useful with a lot of work. Some of the hacks are, well, very hacky. But why bother when there is better code out there on the web (google "swinguistuff completion", or check out swinglabs).

Belongs In Your Swing Toolkit
I've written a fair amount of GUI code and have needed several all-encompassing Swing books strewn about my desktop while doing so. Simply put, this is an incredibly useful book for Swing programmers. Each had their own strengths and weaknesses, so if you had the right collection you could pretty much figure out how to do anything. (Except GridBagLayout of course :-)
This book belongs in that collection. It's unlike the other Swing books because it doesn't attempt to walk its way through the entire Swing framework. Instead, it's a collection of 100 neat and useful things one might want to try while implementing a GUI. The beauty is that each "hack" is pretty much self-contained, so if you're interested in something, check it out; if not, don't. (Although I found myself checking out more stuff than I thought I would. Kinda like, "Oh, so that's how you would do that!" It's almost addicting. ) This also means you can jump around without being penalized for skipping intervening pages.
One more thing I like: They don't just give you the hack; they explain *why* you need to do certain things. There's so much going on behind the scenes in Swing - especially with things like layout, sizing, and painting - that you can waste a lot of time just because you don't know the one or two lines of code necessary to get something just right. If you *understand* what's going on your quest to discover those couple of all-important lines can be shorter and more enjoyable.