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Book on Swing?

martes noviembre 08, 2005 | Java Swing | Permalink | Comentarios [7]

I've been traveling to Sevilla lately and so it's hard to keep on blogging. I beg your pardon. I'll write on the EventBus by the end of the week.

The fact is that a friend of mine is thinking of buying a book on Swing.

I bought a book on Swing ages ago. At that time Swing was prefixed with "com.sun.swing" or something similar, and was not yet integrated in the JDK.

Since then things have changed a lot (I can travel on a high speed train to Sevilla, for instance ;-)). So I thought it would be a good idea to ask you what you think.

Would book would you recommend? Do you know about a good book on Swing? Or, even better, would it be a good idea to write just another book on Swing? If so, which topics would you like to see covered? Is it threading? API? JDNC? JDIC?

All advice will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Antonio

Comentarios:

I would suggest that your friend takes a look at "Desktop Java Live" which, as the title suggests, is a book about desktop Java development. The thing that makes this book interesting is that it is an online SourceBeat title, and as such you subscribe to it, and you get access to all the updates and new chapters as they become available. It costs US$29.95 for a year long subscription, which seems pretty reasonable.

Check it out at http://www.sourcebeat.com/TitleAction.do?id=10 where you can get a sample chapter and summaries of what chapters are already available and what is upcoming.

Enviado por Craig Aspinall en noviembre 08, 2005 a las 12:27 PM CET #

Hi Craig,
Thanks for the tip. I wonder if this book covers all you need for GUI development. This is targetted to advanced Swing users, right?
Cheers,
Antonio

Enviado por Antonio en noviembre 08, 2005 a las 04:22 PM CET #

Hi Antonio,

I haven't used the book myself, I've just heard good things about it. It comes at desktop development from the angle of building rich clients using Swing, so it covers a wide range of topics and offers advice on using some of the top open source projects to help you on your way.

Another alternative (which I use regularly) might be O'Reillys Safari bookshelf (http://safari.oreilly.com) which is another subscription service but offers access to thousands of technical books from a wide range of publishers. There appears to be 10 books on there specifically covering Swing.

Regards,

Craig.

Enviado por 62.24.130.166 en noviembre 10, 2005 a las 12:54 PM CET #

I use JavaDoc's and the web for all of my doc's. I recently did buy a book just because Romain Guy (http://weblogs.java.net/blog/gfx/) submitted some stuff to it, and being that I check his blog when I check yours, Antonio, I figured I'd pre-order the book. I haven't read it yet, funny thing is that I've had it sitting on my desk since I got it. Doh. :)

Enviado por Jeffrey Olson en noviembre 10, 2005 a las 04:27 PM CET #

Hi.

I bought "The Definitive Guide to Java Swing, Third Edition" by John Zukowski (APRESS) and I don't recommend buying it. It is simply javadoc from another perspective, and contains very little explanations of WHYs, and HOWs.

I also read "Java Swing, Second Edition" By Marc Loy, Robert Eckstein, Dave Wood, James Elliott, Brian Cole (O'Reilly), and although it is for 1.4, it is much better. What I'd like to see covered in new book? How Swing works inside. I still don't understand every detail of event handling and dispatching, how swing/awt processes events from OS, how to react for changes in contrast settings in OS, more about accessibility, how to do swing gui testing properly and headless.

Enviado por peter en noviembre 12, 2005 a las 09:32 AM CET #

Hi all,

Thanks for your comments!!

The fact is that I don't like those huge books containing the API on it. I don't like those explaining what a JButton is, and how to do a simple dialog with two buttons on it.

(That's one of the reasons why I prefer Swing to SWT: I have all info I need online, I don't have to buy a book to know how to work with the API. I can have that info "on the go" while traveling. I don't have to carry those huge books in my suitcase. SWT needs a book, and you have to pay for it).

What I would like to see is a book that really explains how to build applications. Real applications.

So thank all for your suggestions. Quite clarifying. I'll review some of your recommendations as soon as possible.

Thanks!

Antonio

Enviado por Antonio en noviembre 14, 2005 a las 05:30 PM CET #

I´m beginner, coming from other languages, and its very difficult to find a complete and really MVC example of a Swing app updating a database using plain JDBC (for starters). So i read all those books and all dont metion real examples this iteration. In my mind an Advanced book would must to show Swing-JDBC examples from using models and JDBC, to data binding frameworks.

Enviado por 201.6.69.9 en enero 09, 2006 a las 04:28 PM CET #

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