Definitive Guide to Swing for Java 2, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Not worth shelling out the $$$
Review: I am a monetarily poor programmer, and I get tired of shelling out my money to learn new areas of programming only to get the book, open it, and realize that the content is barely more than what is freely available on the web.

This book was no exception, barely more info than JavaDoc provides. Why can't these writers take a little more time writing and actually try to explain design concepts, and industry knowledge of best practices. The book contains little more than the information freely available from Sun's JavaDoc, no attempt is made to teach the BEST way to use Swing components or any design methodology. I suppose if you have alot of cash you could use it as a reference, but for those of use with little money, why bother.

Rating:
Summary: Sun's Documentation is Better
Review: I've been using his books since he published his "Teach Yourself JBuilder". The best parts of his work are: concrete code examples; clear, concise, and eminently readable writing; clear and easy to understand diagrams. I guess that pretty much covers the entire book, but then, *he's that good*.

I've got other books on Swing, and I'm starting to see the money I spent before this book as wasted (well, maybe not *wasted*, but you get the idea). As with a previous reader, I found the explanation of undo/redo particularly useful.

Rating:
Summary: Sun's Documentation is Better
Review: The goal of a programming book should be to make it easier to use the language or library. This book doesn't do that. There is no sorting of what is important and what isn't.

Chapter 3, for example, is a very muddled discussion of MVC, and only confuses the whole issue of the place of MVC in Swing. The UML diagrams throughout are not very informative, either.

I bought this book with the hopes that it would give me a big picture overview of swing, but instead it just gets lost in all the details. I finally bit the bullet and read Sun's Swing tutorials and documents, and found them much more informative. I wish I didn't have to read them on the computer screen.

Rating:
Summary: The book for professional Swing development !
Review: This book is not to be used as a reference. It is a tool to teach you all the features of Swing, including all the tips and tricks (that other books won't give you) on how to create Java Swing code that will suite even the most robust sytems. It will also run faster and consume less resources. These 'tricks' will save you a lot of time and effort. It shows you how to make code reusable, short and affective. The exact meaning of good Java code. It teaches you the most advanced features of Swing like trees, undo, drag and drop and so on.
The book uses UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams to simplify for you and show you visially the stucture of the many program examples in the book, in a truly Object Oriented point of view.
In summation: It's a wonderful book and I recommend it to anybody who professionally programs in Java Swing.