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Editorial Review Amazon.com
Java Swing, long regarded as the authoritative book on using the Swing classes, is available in a new edition that builds on a solid foundation in exploring the Java 2 Swing additions and modifications. This is a big, tremendously detailed, exhaustively researched, and ultimately authoritative reference that pushes the limits of what a book can do toward eliminating the necessity of writing experimental programs to see how Swing classes work in practice. You'll find in these pages bits of software that show how most of Swing works: all of the major features get lavish attention, while most of the minor classes are demonstrated adequately, as well.You could probably find demonstrations free of charge on the Internet, however. The true value of this work is in the comments its five authors have attached to their copious examples. They can be quite specific: at least one such segment warns that default Swing behavior violates Mac OS X user interface guidelines and explains how to work around the problem. Another section explains how the methods of the UndoableEdit class can be used in various ways, to implement different user interface behavior options. Some readers will head straight to the O'Reilly Web site, where they can grab the code and examine it in an editor rather than in print--code listings take up a lot of space here--but everyone will appreciate the concise hierarchy, method, and property documentation, as well as the wisdom contained in the prose. --David Wall Topics covered: The Swing classes for creating graphical user interfaces in the Java programming language. It covers all the windowing stuff--dialogs, buttons, containers, layouts, lists, and that kind of thing--as well as tables, trees, text-manipulation classes, formatted text, drag and drop, and accessibility support.Book Description
Swing is a fully-featured user interface development kit for Java applications.Building on the foundations of the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), Swing enables cross-platform applications to use any of several pluggable look-and-feels.Swing developers can take advantageof its rich, flexible features and modular components, building elegant user interfaces with very little code.This second edition of Java Swing thoroughly covers all the features available in Java 2 SDK 1.3 and 1.4. More than simply a reference, this new edition takes a practical approach. It is a book by developers for developers, with hundreds of useful examples, from beginning level to advanced, covering every component available in Swing.All these features mean that there's a lot to learn. Even setting aside its platform flexibility, Swing compares favorably with any widely available user interface toolkit--it has great depth.Swing makes it easy to do simple things but is powerful enough to create complex, intricate interfaces.Java Swing, 2nd edition includes :- A new chapter on Drag and Drop
- Accessibility features for creating a user interface meeting the needs of all users
- Coverage of the improved key binding infrastructure introduced in SDK1.3
- A new chapter on JFormattedTextField and input validation
- Mac OS X coverage and examples
- Coverage of the improved focus system introduced in SDK 1.4
- Pluggable Look-and-Feel coverage
- Coverage of the new layout manager, SpringLayout, from SDK 1.4
- Properties tables that summarize important features of each component
- Coverage of the 1.4 Spinner component
- Details about using HTML in components
- A new appendix listing bound actions for each component
- A supporting web site with utilities, examples, and supplemental materials
Whether you're a seasoned Java developer or just trying to find out what Java can do, you'll find Java Swing, 2nd edition an indispensable guide. ... Read more Customer Reviews (76) 
Very Informative -- A desktop quick reference
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.
Encyclopedic tome on Swing is a greatreference
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.
Good Book With a Bad Title
This is for people who have a working knowledge of Swingand who want a comprehensive reference on their desks. I ampreparing 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
yikes!!
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.
Pretty Thorough Reference
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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