Core Swing: Advanced Programming [With CDROM]

This book was wisely focused on selected advanced Swing topics, rather than trying to be comprehensive. I suspect Kim Topley could write two or three additional books with a similar level of detail on other advanced Swing topics, and it was sensible not to write 2500 pages all at once._If_ the focus topics (everything you might want to know about text components, table cell renderers and editors, drag-and-drop, undo/redo) are of interest to you, you won't find a better text anywhere, explicitly including all the Swing tutorials available on the Web. This is not a Swings basics book, but it _is_ an excellent how-to, and often why-to, book. Lots of code examples, lots of explanation.Let me repeat: This is not a Swing basics book. The emphasis is not on how to apply the stock JFC components, but rather on how to customize, modify and extend the JFC components. For example, instead of just saying "JFC drag-and-drop support is limited primarily to raw text", Topley shows you how to implement support for d-d of whatever data types you are interested in. Actual d-d data interchange representations are not discussed, as that is highly platform- and datatype-specific.

Several recent reviews of this book seem to be written with a misunderstanding of its scope. As its title says, this book is about advanced Swing programming - it is not intended as an introductory book. The reviewer who complains about there not being a description of how a table works or which is the row and which is the column when building a TableModel form an Object[][] is perfectly correct to say that it is not covered here - in fact, all of that is completely covered in Core JFC, which *IS* an introductory text. Returning the book might well be appropriate in this case - but only because this is not the book that he should have ordered in the first place.

This is a very well written, specialized book meant for experienced Swing developers. In it Topley covers some of the most complex Swing topics with clarity, detail and useful examples: - Text Components and the HTML package - Bi-Directional Text - Custom Text Component Views - Table Rendering - Table Editing - Drag-and-Drop - Undo/RedoIf you are an experienced Swing developer needing to go deeper with any of the above, I would highly recommend this book. It is not for learning Swing (hence the title "Advanced Programming"), and it is a pity that it has been reviewed as such by some others here.- Matt Robinson co-author of "Swing" (Manning Publications, Inc.)

I like the 'Core...' books and really appreciate their format. This one is no exception. The chapters are as with the 'Core Java 2' books very clear and to the point. I wanted to know about menus, it got me where I wanted to go in 10 minutes, same with custom dialogs. Sofar I read about 80% of the book in random order. I just read those chapters on the subject I need more info on. No need to read previous chapters, no need to read following chapters either. If you're like me, and don't have enough time to do all that you want to. You definitely need this book.

This is the second book by Kim Topley that I have purchased, I bought the first book: Java Foundation Classes when it first came out and found it very useful, so was very pleased to see the new book.I have found these books to be a good source of reference and good tutorials. The text is clear and concise and the examples well written and illustrate the subject very well. I initially bought the book because of work I was doing on Drag and Drop and Undo, but found the whole book very useful.Well worth reading by anyone developing in Swing.