The JFC Swing Tutorial

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