Swing by Matthew Robinson & Pavel Vorobiev (Manning)

Looking for a book on Swing with in-depth coverage of the how�s and whys? Then Swing by Matthew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev is it.
The authors use the first few chapters to cover an overview of Swing with an emphasis on what goes on behind the scenes. This may seem intimidating to those less familiar with Swing, but it does prove to be an excellent introduction to the concepts of Swing. The authors then turn their attention to the basics of Swing, including frames, panels, layout managers, splitpanes, scrolling panes, combos and list boxes, dialogs, progress bars, sliders, and scroll bars, buttons and labels, among others.
Next are advanced topics including the use of layered panes to enhance interfaces, MDI, text, internal frames and a comprehensive discussion on the complex and often complicated topic of Trees and Tables. Developers looking for the �Hello World� application won�t find it here. In its place are exhaustive coding samples with detailed explanations. The authors take great care to discuss the importance of threads in Swing, focusing on multi-threading and how to build thread-safe methods. Throughout the book the authors also make it a point to include UI delegation examples and when to use the default implementations and when to override them. The last couple of chapters focus on the special topics of printing and a brief introduction to Java2D.
Overall this is an excellent book, and I would recommend it for the intermediate to advanced Swing developer.
(AnnMarie Ziegler -GreenHorn, September 2001)
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