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Summary: SWING the best tute
Review: The best tutorial I could find in this nature
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Summary: Good for beginners, but doesn't go far enough.
Review: The JFC Swing Tutorial is a guide to designing applications that use the Swing graphical components of the Java 2 Platform, and also Swing for JDK1.1. The authors do a fine job of guiding the reader through the basics concepts of Swing, and the new graphical components. For developers with little AWT experience, the new AWT event-delegation model is described in detail - you'll learn how to write event handlers that respond to GUI component actions.I'm impressed by the clarity of this guide to Swing. Most Swing books presume a high level of experience with constructing GUIs in Java. However, I feel that the book could have gone much further, and provided some moderate-to-large scale applications as examples of what can be done with Swing. Many books devote a chapter or two towards the end to a Do-It-Yourself project, and offer step-by-step assistance. This is lacking from the book, and would have really added to its appeal. I also found the layout of the book distracting - it has been converted from a hypertext document, and all the links are still underlined.  The JFC Swing Tutorial is a good general guide to learning about the Swing components. I feel that beginners will get more out of this book though than experienced AWT programmers, who may wish to consider other Swing titles. The book also includes a CD, with copies of Swing, JDK1.1 and the Java 2 SDK. -- David Reilly, for the Java Coffee Break
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Summary: I Second Thomas Duff's Review
Review: The JFC Swing Tutorial Second Edition is among the very best how-to-do it programming books I've read---and I've read scores! For this reason, I felt compelled to write a review of the book, admiring its organization, applauding its authors and encouraging progammers who need to to write Java GUIs to hurry up and by it. But then I read Thomas Duff's review; I became redundant. My recommendation is to read Mr. Duff's excellent review---knowing that I agree with every word of it.
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Summary: Many better books!
Review: There are many better books than this one for mastering Swing. John Zukowski's book from Apress and Topley and Geary's books from Prentice Hall are much,much better and in the case of Zukowski and Topley second volume also more up to date. Note that I think Zukowski's book is the best solution if you want a fairly consise treatment of what you need to know but Topley's two books (if he ever revises Core JFC) would be the ideal comprehensive solution since Gearey's has given up finishing his "encyclopedia."
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Summary: great potential but poor delivery
Review: This book has a great potential to be instructive, however, i give it a one star because it fails miserably in the delivery. The book has one full example in chapter 2 then after that all the examples are from the CD and the information about a particular issue such as comboboxes for example is strewn with code snippets that only address the most basic information; but when one looks at the full example from the CD, it contains much more in depth code that goes beyond the scope of the particular lesson. This left me with a confused situation. On one hand i have a very basic example that only shows the bare minimum of how to use a component and on the other i have code that introduces methods that are not very pertinent to the example and require more explanation. If it is pertinent then it should be explained fully which is not.
The book has great potential. For me, i would rather see the full examples at the end of each chapter or at the end of each lesson where the code snippets reside. This would be more helpful to me as i could study the full code without having to go to the CD or its copy in my drive and navigate through the way nested tree to get to each example. Thus one star.
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Summary: If you know how to use it you'll be fine.
Review: This book is good and bad at the same time. It's not something I would recommend for someone trying to learn swing. It has some good stuff in it to read but it is not a book to read and learn from. It's more like a reference. It's order, well it has no order let me put it that way. Things are all over the place. At the end of the day even if you want to use this book you should just look it up online. It's available on Sun's site. It's easier to read it online since it has links jumping around from subject to subject and section to section. Hope that helped.
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Summary: Not Enough Depth And Poorly Structured
Review: This book provides an acceptable introduction to Swing components, but falls short in a couple of crucial areas. First, coverage is very superficial, and as a result the book does nothing to impart an understanding of Swing component design. For example, the table component offers two model classes: AbstractTableModel and DefaultTableModel. If you want to know the differences between the two models, and when is it preferable to use one over the other, this book offers no guidance whatsoever. Twenty pages are devoted to the table component (Swing's most complex component, about which an entire book could be written) which is not nearly enough to understand or effectively use the component. Second, the book's organization is abysmal, due to its origins as an online book. It appears that the book was printed exactly as it appears online -- underlined links and all -- which may have been the easy way out for the authors, but puts a terrible strain on readers. Following links by clicking the mouse is one thing, but following links by flipping pages is horrible. Also, the material is not presented in a logical manner; for example, handling events, which is a basic concept that should be discussed before individual components, appears somewhere in the middle of the book. If you need a superficial overview of how to perform basic functions with Swing components, then you may benefit from this book. If you want to understand how Swing components are designed, how to perform intermediate-advanced techniques, and how to get the most out of Swing, look elsewhere.
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Summary: This is a great book
Review: This is a book for all to read. Whethe you are a programmer or an analyst this book is a must read.
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Summary: Simply and easily explained complicated material
Review: This is the best Swing book that I have read thus far. I used it as a jump start to object-oriented GUI programming. It shortened the learning curve considerably. Kathy Walrath and Mary Campione are excellent authors. Their writing style is very clear and understandable.
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Summary: Anything and Everything you can do with SWING
Review: This is the ultimate starter,tutorial,reference for all your swing applications.Anything and everything you can do with swing is cleary explained.Overall the one-stop guide to become a master of the swing API.
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