Rating: 
Summary: An excelent reference, but
Review: This book is an excelent reference book for a person who wants a lot of detail about the workings of a particular component. It is not for a beginner. Advanced swing programmers only. This book's deteriment is that it gives too much meaningless detail that you might need only once in a great while. It simply will not work for anything but a programmer's reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I bought this book at the beginning of a long weekeend, trying to understand how to make a JTable editable with combos. By the end of the 3rd day I rushed to the bookstore and got my money back. Then I bought the Swing book my Robinson/Vorobiev and my table with combos was ready in half an hour, understanding what I was doing.
Rating:
Summary: There are better books
Review: This book is mostly a restatement of the info available in the javadocs for Swing. As such, it's more of a reference work than a tool for learning about the fine points of using Swing. A far better book for learning and using Swing is "Core Java Foundation Classes". It's full of examples and why you'd approach a problem one way rather than another. Based on my "postit-its" rating system (how many post-it's I have marking key areas of a book for quick access), Core Java Foundation Classes is 8 times more useful than Java Swing.
Rating:
Summary: "Too Many Notes..."
Review: I purchased this book at the urging of a Professor teaching a masters level course in Software Engineering. I didn't need the book for the course in any manner, but I elected to read it last summer from page "v" to page 1145. The book is very exhaustive which is how I felt after completing it.The book does posses many detailed examples, but it is filled with elaborate replication of the JavaTM 2 Platform API Specification, readily available on line. Some of the explanations accompanying the lists of methods and fields do extend beyond the detail of the API Specification. Unfortunately, the numerous, unnecessary pages listing protected class members are cumbersome and useless. In my opinion, a quarter of this book could have been omitted without significant loss of content.
Rating: 
Summary: Great for learning Swing deeply, with caveats
Review: I like this book greatly; it is a good reference and explanation on Swing, expanding upon the online javadocs. I think that unfortunately Swing and "enterprise Java" are too new to have one good reference. Swing is based on Java Beans, and the only place I read that explains Beans clearly (without clutter) is Robinson/Vorobiev's _Swing_, ch.2 (purchase here or preview online). Parts of the book I'm reviewing would remain very confusing otherwise. (What's a bound property?!) Unfortunately that book isn't the best place to jump into Swing for most. You might want to look at Sun's Tutorial book on Swing (also buy here/preview online). It is quite possible to learn Swing inexpensively, just keep in mind that the path is not obvious. And if you want to write something like a sort of HTML wordprocessor, the API from Sun is pretty buggy because it's so new. Java is easily the most book-intensive language I've ever played with; on the other hand, learning something like Swing is a crash course in structuring GUI's, so it's probably worth it for the fun value.
Rating:
Summary: Useless for working programmers trying to learn quick
Review: When you're trying to get a project in Swing up and running fast, you need a book that has a good mix of examples, theory, and then the details later. I am an experienced GUI interface programmer in other languages, but found that this book couldn't answer anything but the simplest questions, because it would get you bogged down in the internal details too soon. I may come back to this book later when I need a detailed reference, but for now, it's time to look for another book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference
Review: This is must have reference for anyone that wants to learn Java Swing. It covers almost every class in Swing, with detailed explanations of what its most important methods do, it members and constants and examples on how to use them. These examples demonstrate just how powerful and rich applications developed with Swing can be. While the author assumes that the reader has some Java and Object Oriented knowledge, this book serves as a solid reference to those who want to learn Swing either from scratch or to expand their programming skills.
Rating:
Summary: Not a tremendous improvement over the javadocs
Review: Although I found this book worth the $20 I paid for it, I doubt I'd be happy if I paid the cover price for it. The book is basically the javadocs with better organization and a little extra explanation. It is helpful material but including all the protected classes and methods in the book just confuses the lessons to be learned. The examples are often lacking where you want them and sometimes they don't bother to explain or show the results of the example code. The book oftentimes explains the classes well, but not how they are used in coding or their interaction with other classes, just how the class itself works. Of the sections I've read in the book my biggest complaint comes with chapters 20 and 21. The documentation orientation of this book combined with the fact that document and style structures are so complex in Swing makes it nearly impossible to follow how the overall classes are organized, what their function is and how they interact. I've been reading about so many inner classes and now I come across the fact that I most likely won't be dealing with most of them in any significant way - nor would most any other programmer. It's fine to make a book for people "trying to find out what Java can do" with a reliance on the javadocs but leave the extraneous protected and private classes and methods outside of the explanations and tutorials and put them some place out of the way.
Rating: 
Summary: To much irrelevant info
Review: The aim of this book seems to be covering everything... There's a lot of irrelevant info for the average Swing-user (I think). And you can't just read the relevant parts, as things are intermixed. Seems like the authors aimed to write as many pages as possible rather than only the really relevant stuff...
Rating:
Summary: From a beginner: this book's great!
Review: I've read a large number of technical computer books, and I've found that the quality of writing varies enormously from book to book (Wrox). And so, too, does the overall comprehensibility. This book, however, really made my life easy. In the project I was working on, I knew pretty much what I needed to do, and this book facilitated my understanding of Swing greatly. The text is filled with examples and thoroughly documents each of the Swing components. I found it very helpful as a supplement to the official Java documentation. I hadn't read an O'Reilly book until this one and I have to say that I'm impressed. I'll be trying out some of their other books in the hopes that the quality carries over.
| 
