The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace

This book introduces SWT and JFace in details and with good example codes, which helps me doing my own projects greatly. I have "Swt JFace In Action" book too, which is not as useful.

if you are looking for something to walk you through widget by widget..holding your hand this is your book . Excellent reference and very clear structure. Good to have by your desk when you need to look up something and dont like reading javadocs from the source ...

This is the second book that I have read on SWT. The other was Addison Wesley's book "SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit", which is in the Eclipse series. That was a short book that flew through the topic. This is a much more in-depth work. Both books share the same introductory style. They walk through the toolkit from front-to-back and demonstrate each concept and widget by showing code and screen shots. Each book suffers from the same long term problem in that it cannot be used as reference material since neither book provides an appendix that would serve that purpose. That being said, I still prefer this book because it is much more in-depth and presents a shallower longer learning curve than the Addison-Wesley book.

This is an excellent book for both the beginner and the professional developer. If you need to write an application and are planning to use SWT but are not a guru, you will want to get this book. It does a great job of explaining SWT, what it is, why it is that way, and how to use it. Each section of the book provides a topic for discussion, a code example and a complete description of all the classes and methods used. I particularly appreciated the code examples and the tips for real world implementation. The code is clean, complete, and easy to understand. I found this book easy to read. The author interspersed just the right amount of theory, history, and commentary to break up the details and keep me interested. It is obvious that he has a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. The surprising part is how adept he is at communicating this knowledge to the reader.

I won't be needing another SWT book in a while... "The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace" is indeed definitive and proved to be a nearly perfect choice for starting my journey inside Eclipse's much hyped GUI toolkit(s). The book starts from scratch, explaining the history and motivation for a different approach to a GUI toolkit (SWT's native peer widgets vs. the emulated widgets of Swing, etc.), proceeding to your typical Hello World app with a single window and a single label, and ends up covering most everything I can think of needing to build even a relatively complex GUI using SWT and JFace. The book is a huge tome, partly because it includes listings of all the various methods provided by the classes introduced along the way. On one hand, it's a good thing because the book is pretty much all you need (i.e. a decent replacement for Google;), and on the other hand, the book would be a lot more pleasant to read if you'd drop a few hundred pages... One thing I specifically liked about the book is that the authors have done a good job employing screenshots where needed -- especially in the chapter about layouts. I'll definitely recommend this book for anyone looking to learn SWT. I'm not really a GUI developer (only having done Swing for personal stuff) and the book works for me as an introduction, tutorial, and a reference.