Rating: 
Summary: Good examples and discussion, but...
Review: A book of 1300 pages should have a good index. This one does not. As a reference, I seldom refer to it for this reason.
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Summary: Excellent resource for development using Swing
Review: Being a new comer to object oriented concepts and gui, this book has helped me a great deal in understanding the inner working of the Swing components. A good reference book and a learning aid.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing for the scope
Review: For a book that is dedicated to Swing, I found the book uninsightful. The organization of the book is confusing and thus difficult to use. The table of contents are a somewhat helpful in this area, but since there is no index, it is not very useful as a reference text. Unfortunately it not particularly good as an introduction to the Swing interface either, so I am not quite sure who is the best audience. But there is a lot of raw data, so some should find some value from it, particularly if this is the only information available on Swing.
Rating:
Summary: Not enough wood ; too much trees
Review: I am having some issues developing an application using Swing and this book is helping me very little. Its biggest problem right now for me is that it doesn't have a section covering layout managers -- quite amazing for a book of over 1600 pages supposedly dedicated to Swing. Maybe layout managers aren't technically part of Swing (??), but they should be in here.In general, there is a lot of information in this book which doesn't help me much, or is no more than is available free from Sun's website. The information I really need in order to understand Swing and solve my problems -- such as how the layout managers work and how the virtual machine decides when to execute queued GUI requests -- are either not here at all or so deeply embedded within a mass of superfluous information as to be useless. I'm going to return my copy.
Rating:
Summary: good coverage on Swing with complete example
Review: I don't know how many times the examples from other books don't work for me. You got to turn back and collect all the pieces together. This book puts the complete examle at the end of chapter. If you just need to read the example to figure out what it tries to accomplish, just go straight there. This book is what you need to learn about Swing. Definitely a good source. I hope to see his Advance Swing soon.
Rating:
Summary: Not very approachable
Review: I find this book too hard for beginner + intermediate level. I saw the earlier comments on Amazon & bought the book. But I have not been able to use even one section comfortably. The book is full of details & not very approachable. I would advise any programmer to work with Core Java 2, v1 and complete atleast upto chapter 9 or 10 before attempting to read this book. It is probably not worth the price if you just want to get a feel for some of the components & work them around in your programs. But I suppose java gurus will find it helpful for it introduces them to all the relevant classes & interfaces with respect to particular components.
Rating:
Summary: approachable and thorough
Review: I found this book to be a thorough start-to-finish explanation of Swing, with detailed coverage of each component. There is a wealth of online information about Java and Swing, and there are also other Swing books, but I never saw the big picture until I bought this book. A MUST READ for any Java GUI developer. Other reviewers have stated that this book was too complex for beginner and intermediate developers. I strongly disagree. Swing itself is complex and powerful, and to leverage its full potential requires advanced programming skill. However I do not believe it, or this book, could be made any simpler and remain as useful and powerful. If you want simplicity, get a book on VB!
Rating:
Summary: An indispensible resource when using Swing
Review: I have been a fan of David Geary's books since the first edition of 'Graphic Java' in which he developed the GJT using 1.0.2 AWT components. His books have just the right balance of source code examples and in-depth discussion of the topic. The examples clearly show how to take the concepts further rather than letting the developer wonder -- "How do REALLY use this thing?" The same day as David's book arrived from Amazon .com I found the answer to a problem which had nagged me that morning. I give this book the highest marks and look forward to the next two volumes, "Advanced Swing" and "2D API".
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I have been using this book on a daily basis (writing a swing app) and would like to say that its examples are excellent. It would be better if the Class Diagrams used UML and if some redundancy were eliminated (though not all, since it is a reference book, some redundancy is good). However its breath of topics and examples are excellent, and I would recommend it as a must for Java Swing programmers.
Rating:
Summary: Best Swing Book
Review: I have five Swing books, and this book provides by far the most thorough and well-written coverage of Swing. Although it is a huge book, there is no fluff as there is in other Swing books. The writing is clear and concise and topics are presented in a logical manner. The first quarter of the book covers fundamental Swing concepts including meticulous coverage of the JComponent class and the best explanation of Model/View/Controller, including Swing's version of MVC, that I've seen in print. The last three quarters of the book discusses Swing components, with excellent coverage of Swing's most complex components: JTree and JTable. Not only does this book show you how to use Swing components, it also gives you an understanding of how Swing is designed. If you're serious about using Swing, this is the book to get.
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