Swing, Second Edition

The JFC Swing Tutorial: A Guide to Constructing GUIs, Second Edition

Jfc And Swing

Up to Speed with Swing

Format: Paperback
Author: Steven Gutz
ReleaseDate: September, 1999
Publisher: Manning Publications
Rating:

Good as far as it goes

The book is a good introduction to Swing, getting this Java programmer started fairly quickly. My copy has a little different cover, says "2nd edition", and is copyright 2000, but I couldn't find an exact match on Amazon. 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.

Fast track to SWING
The author covered all features of the SWING. Upto speed with Swing by Steven Gutz is really a fast track to most advanced GUI , 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!!!.

Disappointed that book omits important areas
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. I read all the reviews and thought this book would provide a good reference on 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.