Java Foundation Classes: Swing Reference

Rating:
Summary: An excellent reference
Review: Definitely for the advanced Swing user (or someone who feels they are done with tutorials), I have been finding this book a useful reference.

The inheritance diagrams are a great help, along with the table of Look and Feel keys in the appendix.

Rating:
Summary: Java Foundation Classes Swing Reference
Review: Ever been stumped because Swing didn't work the way JavaDoc said it should? Then this book is for you. Working directly from the Swing source code, the authors wrote it from scratch. It is not a dump of the online JavaDoc - in fact, the authors didn't trust a single description. Java Foundation Classes: Swing Reference presents correct, concise and clear Swing documentation based on their independent experience with, and verification of the Swing code.

This book starts with an in-depth tutorial designed to effectively jump-start your Swing development. The authors have distilled their extensive experience in overviews and analyses that give you professional and practical insight into JFC/Swing. Once you're up and running, this reference will become your invaluable Swing assistant, available 24 hours a day.

Rating:
Summary: Swing grows up
Review: Hi there, welcome to the Amazon page for my book with Bill Wake.

Bill and I spent a full year working on this book. We started working on it at Swing 0.7, and the final product is up to date with JDK 1.2 (and 1.2.1).

That year was spent reading _all_ of the Swing code, to figure out what it actually did rather than what it was supposed to do. We didn't simply dump the JavaDoc to make this book; we re-wrote _every entry_ to reflect our full understanding of how the APIs actually worked. I'm sure Bill will agree when I say that I now know more about Swing than I ever expected to ;) .Hope you enjoy the book!

Rating:
Summary: An excellent reference
Review: I was disappointed by this book. Most of the space is taken up by a listing of the Swing class types and parameters. Whilst the annotation is useful, and the book is distinctive in it's reference style, the information is too focussed on a method by method rather than "how do I do this?" types of questions.

If you already have David Geary's Swing book and the O'Reilly book, this adds a small value but get those titles first.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing - doesn't live up to the publicity
Review: I was disappointed by this book. Most of the space is taken up by a listing of the Swing class types and parameters. Whilst the annotation is useful, and the book is distinctive in it's reference style, the information is too focussed on a method by method rather than "how do I do this?" types of questions.

If you already have David Geary's Swing book and the O'Reilly book, this adds a small value but get those titles first.

Rating:
Summary: Useful for quick reference
Review: Though this book is not nearly as useful as other Swing books when it comes to learning hoiw things work. It is organized so nicely that referencing things is often faster than it is in the online docs. Not my favorite book, but well done and original. I recommend it only for veterans. Also its the only book that covers all of the Basic PLAF (I would have given it 3 stars if it didn't have this).