Customer Reviews (25)

A must-have reference for any up-to-date Java GUI programmer
Up To Speed With Swing is a necessary companion to any serious Java GUI programmer (beginning or advanced). It covers basic implementation details of components as well as key features that expose the power and flexibility unique to Swing.

I've been working with Swing since December '97 and have had numerous issues (important issues) that I was forced to leave dangling until I could find someone with a solution. SwingSet (a demo with source code included with SUN's Swing package) provides some insight, but it does not cover many critical areas. Up to Speed with Swing has provided me with, amazingly enough, every single solution I was looking for. I have even been able to come up with a few real neat tricks of my own on top of that.

Without this book I would have been left at a standstill. Now I am moving at a very rapid pace, and having more fun because of it.

Up To Speed With Swing is "thick" in content and undoubtedly deserves the best rating I can give.

Fair, but rushed, effort
The author should be commended for penetrating the dense, and at times insufficient, Swing documentation to generate some useful examples. Even so, far too many important issues are glossed over and there are many, many typos. Overall, a very rushed job.

The author is definately a hold over from the AWT coding days; his applications tend to subclass JFrame (a now unecessary habit) and he avoids all use of inner classes without any explanation of their pros or cons.

The chapters build, in a rather unpredictable manner, towards the more complex examples, which mix JTree and JTable together.

On the flip side, the book is very effective at uses screen grabs and illustrations to demonstrate ideas (a weakness in other books, notably Eckel's "Thinking in Java").

In the final consideration, I seem to be liking this book less as I refer to it more and more. I'll choose my next book on JFC/Swing more carefully.

Good as far as it goes
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. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Bks - Languages / Programming   2. Computer Books: General   3. Computer Networks   4. Computers   5. Java (Computer program languag   6. Java (Computer program language)   7. Java foundation classes   8. Programming Languages - Java   9. Swing (Computer file)   10. User Interface   11. User interfaces (Computer syst   12. User interfaces (Computer systems)   13. Virtual Reality   14. Computers/Internet   

Subjects:  1. Broken symmetry (Physics)   2. Kac-Moody algebras   3. Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equatio   4. Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equations   5. Mathematical physics   6. Quantum Theory   7. Quantum groups   8. Science   9. Science/Mathematics   10. Waves & Wave Mechanics   

Customer Reviews (2)

This is an excellent new American translation
This is an excellent new translation of an important text. German is a hard language, so if the original is not accessible to you, don't grab the first British translation off the shelf--I enjoyed this fresh and highly readable translation (considering this is Expressionim) in American English. It's a good paperback version for use in undergraduate and high school world literature courses, I think, as well.

An Expressionist Novel, At Last
Most of us, somewhere along the line, have heard the term "Expressionism" applied to paintings, particularly those of certain artists working in Central-Europe during the period 1910-1930. There was even something of a rediscovery and subsequent vogue, a few years back, in the work of such artists as Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoshka, Kandinsky, et. al. Aside from painting, though less notably, the Expressionist label also encompasses the works of certain composers, playwrights and poets of the period. As a long time fan of Expressionist art, I'd often wondered where were all the great Expressionist novelists and short story writers of that time and, if there had been any, why was I not finding their work on library and book store shelves?

A little investigating suggested there really weren't that many literary types writing prose fiction clearly fitting the Expressionist mold. Those who undoubtedly were oriented that way, the poets and playwrights, actually published quite a lot in Europe during the second two decades of the last century. What the most famous prose writers of the time were producing, on the other hand, were a lot of highly cultivated and cerebral or quasi-mystical works (Thomas Mann and Robert Musil come to mind) rather than the wildly spontaneous and emotion driven works we associate with Expressionism. Kafka hovers somewhere around the periphery, more a surrealist than anything else though, in reality, representing a stylistic mode all his own.

How exciting, then, to come across a novel, newly (and expertly) translated into English, by one of those few fiction writers who clearly advanced the Expressionist program.

Hermann Ungar's novel, The Maimed, written in 1921/22, first appeared in print in its entirety in 1923. The author, born in 1893 to a well-off Jewish family in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, obtained a law degree in 1918 and thereafter took up acting and writing for the theater. His first published work, a short story collection (Boys and Murderers) appeared in 1920 and caused a minor sensation garnering praise from the likes of Thomas Mann and the director Berthold Viertel. Ungar himself initially had serious reservations about going ahead with publication of The Maimed in 1922, fearing a scandal, and his publisher's reluctance to risk obscenity charges led to its being withdrawn until a second publisher brought it out, uneventfully, the following year. Ungar's subsequent literary career was brief and not especially noteworthy: some journalistic reportage and a second novel, The Class (1927). In 1929 he died of acute appendicitis at the age of thirty-six.

The Maimed is a disturbing book. It's a raw and jarring depiction of childhood trauma, poverty, sexual depravity, neurotic obsession and violence. Originally begun as a first person narrative, Ungar switched to the third person so as to minimize the chance of being identified with his protagonist, Franz Polzer, a severely repressed and neurotic survivor of child abuse who as an adult is as much a victim of internal demons as outside forces. Following the compulsively ordered Franz slowly losing his grip on his world as the circumstances and events of his life increasingly fly out of control, the story and its language become correspondingly fractured and unreal ratcheting up the tension as things move along. The Expressionists were really the first great portrayers of 20th century angst and this is most definitely the kind of thing Ungar serves up here. Lurid? Yes, but in a most artfully controlled and psychologically penetrating fashion. Indeed, the book is rife with detailed explorations of the subterranean recesses of Franz's subconscious and Freudian implications abound.

It's fascinating to examine the parallels between this kind of writing and the Expressionist paintings we're familiar with, especially the tortured images of Egon Schiele or the wry caricatures of George Grosz. Like both of those artists, Ungar's canvas is very much urban and underclass. He indulges a taste for the grotesque in the form of Franz's best friend Karl, a disease-riddled, multiple amputee who wallows in mocking self pity and he teeters on the edge of vulgarity in his unflattering descriptions of the bovine qualities of the sexual predator, Klara, Franz's landlady. Virtually any page of the book might serve as subject matter for the imaginations of a whole host of Expressionist painters and as the destructive elements of the story multiply, Ungar progressively and fittingly distorts his verbal palette.

This is not to say the book is entirely without artistic faults but these are minor and one is reluctant to quibble when examples of this kind of literature are so rare. After its first publication, there apparently were some who were dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the ending and the present translation includes a fragment Ungar added to later editions to clear things up. It is known, however, that Ungar preferred the original and I, having found it just fine myself, avoided reading the addition and so, can't comment on it. Recommended to anyone looking for something a bit twisted or who loves any of the painters mentioned. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Fiction   2. Fiction - General   3. General   4. Literary   5. Literature: Classics   

Subjects:  1. Acting   2. Acting & Auditioning   3. Acting in opera   4. Genres & Styles - Opera   5. Moscow   6. Music   7. Opera   8. Performing Arts/Dance   9. Production and direction   10. Russia (Federation)   11. Theater - History & Criticism   

Subjects:  1. Fiction   2. Literature - Classics / Criticism   3. Novel   4. Semantics   

Subjects:  1. (Pavel Aleksandrovich),   2. 1882-1937   3. 20th century   4. Eastern Christian Churches   5. Florenskii, P. A   6. History   7. Metaphysics   8. Theology, Doctrinal   

Customer Reviews (4)

Excellent depiction of people - in their complexity.
One sentence on the first page caught my attention - the remainder of the book continued to hold my attention with the same mastery of depicting the complexity of people in simple terms. The sentence? "He could plow and sow, milk cows, cook potato pancakes, find wild boletus mushrooms even out of season, ferry people in his boat during high waters, weave baskets, hunt deer, rescue travelers and half-frozen animals, silence the stupid, and he knew how to laugh." - that is the description of Uncle Prosek who, to the young narrator, knew how to do everything.

It is Uncle Prosek who taught the narrator to fish, who helped the narrator's Jewish father poach a deer ... The independent chapters which make up this novel tell of the family adventures before the war - father becoming the world's best Electrolux salesman for the love of the wife of his boos, falling for a scam on purchasing a carp pond and years later giving the scam artist appropriate revenge. During the war, the two older sons and the father are sent to concentration camps; they survive but grandmother does not. Here the novels tells of the narrator's escapades fishing to survive - encountering mill owners who cheat him and fish wardens who act kindly to him. And finally the book follows his father into life after the war.

Throughout the book, the ability of the author to depict people - an attribute the narrator ascribes both to the narrator's father and to a famous painter known to the father - makes this "simple" memoir into a memorable study of human behavior. This is human behavior of the roguish, flawed but fundamentally kind nature.

Fishermen may enjoy this book but the book is of human nature, portrayed in conjunction with fishing, not a book of fishing. Well worth the short time it takes to read this book.

more than a fishing book
I fell quickly and completely in love with this book. Unpretentious, disarmingly honest, simple without being simplistic. It's also sneaky -- it purports to be a memoir of a simple, arcadian time and place, then blindsides you with the realization that this was not such a simple time after all. I wish I could give it six stars.

Fishing against a backdrop of war.
This gentle, unassuming book is one of the most powerful I have ever read. It is the story of a young boy's experiences with life as his days change from idyllic afternoons of fishing to the realities of WWII. Much more than a book about fishing, though it contains many wonderful espisodes about fish and fishing, it is a recounting of the hardships, terrors, and ultimate kindnesses that populate war. As you will learn, fish and fishing became the metaphor for freedom for Ota Pavel. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Fiction   2. Fiction - General   3. Short Stories (single author)   4. Slavic Literature   

Subjects:  1. Chronic fatigue syndrome   2. Diet / Health / Fitness   3. Diseases   4. Diseases - General   5. Health & Fitness   6. Health Care Issues   7. Health/Fitness   8. Popular works   

Subjects:  1. Children's 4-8   2. General   

Subjects:  1. Photography, Artistic   

Customer Reviews (1)

Cruel but fascinating and funny
The book is filled with descriptions, excerpts, quotes etc from the rich history of "lawfull" homicide. Every method of execution or torture, are minutely explained. Do not mistake, this is not a reference book. All the above comes within a story about an aficionado hang-man opening a school for executioners. There is much more to tell, of course, mainly about the feminine student that gives the book its title, but I will let you read for yourself. If you ever read another Kohout, you will like this one, if not, it's as good as any to begin with. Enjoy. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Fiction   2. Slavic (Language) Contemporary Fiction   

Subjects:  1. Eastern Europe   2. Eastern Europe - General   3. History   4. History - General History   5. History: World   6. Slavs   

Subjects:  1. Composition & Creative Writing - Academic   2. Education   3. Handbooks, manuals, etc   4. Higher   5. Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy   6. Methodology   7. Report writing   8. Research   9. Study and teaching (Higher)   10. Study and teaching (Secondary)   

Subjects:  1. Art & Art Instruction   2. Arts   3. Criticism   4. Essays   5. Reference   6. Themes, motives   

Subjects:  1. Differential Equations   2. Engineering - General   3. Finite element method   4. General   5. Mathematics   6. Science/Mathematics   7. Technology & Industrial Arts   

Subjects:  1. Engineering - Civil   2. Engineering - Hydraulic   3. Hydraulic structures   4. Science/Mathematics   5. Technology   6. Technology & Industrial Arts   7. Hydraulic engineering   

Subjects:  1. 1894-1917   2. Politics and government   3. Russia   

Subjects:  1. Education / Counseling