ISBN:1884777759Amazon.com
Stephen Gutz's competent book about one of Java's graphical user interface (GUI)-building technologies covers everything you'd want in a Swing book--layouts, events, all the components, and more. Gutz focuses on the interface components, detailing buttons, text elements, and tables. Throughout, his code is clear and easy to follow, and a chapter about look-and-feel programming is excellent.
The Web resources that support this book are what distinguish it from the crowd of Swing books. Gutz monitors and participates in a question-and-answer forum on the Manning site. Java programmers post questions in this forum, and other programmers--including Gutz, who seems quite active--reply with solutions and advice. The site appears to be quite heavily used, yet with a good signal-to-noise ratio. The Q&A forum is only one piece of the site--it also features the illustrative code from the book, an errata page, and an Adobe Acrobat copy of the text. The publisher restricts access to the Web site by prompting you for a particular word from the book before assigning you a username and password.
Thanks to the Web site and Gutz's participation there, it's almost as though you get free consulting time when you buy this book. --David Wall/p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
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.
Fast track to SWING
Upto speed with Swing by Steven Gutz is really a fast track to most advanced GUI , the SWING. The author covered all features of the SWING. The book is very interesting to read and complete with working examples. All the chapters are organized and well written. It defenitely a needed book to learn things fast and work with, rather than voluminous and time consuiming books. I recommend this book for beginner/ intermediate level of java programmers. Thanks for Steven Gutz for his efforts to put the java programmers on fast track!!!