Comments about oreilly Swing Hacks:

Reading and using this book helped bring the APIs to life for me. In Swing, there are often many ways to reach a goal, and Swing Hacks has helped to point the most interesting, creative, and efficient ways. I really had no idea Swing was so powerful until I picked up this book. I hope the authors will write another Swing book that extends this one, and perhaps integrates JavaFX into Swing GUIs also.

Comments about oreilly Swing Hacks:

I bought this book when if first came out. I love it. I wonder if these other reviewers simply had the wrong expectations. I still like to read it, years later. It is inspiring. Getting under the hood of Swing is fun, and this book does a great job.

I would like to see more complete code examples in the download. But more importantly I'd like to see another book!

Good work.

Comments about oreilly Swing Hacks:

The constantly changing fonts (some of them cartoonish), font sizes and styles may have seemed like a "cute" approach at first but they quickly become annoying. Some pages have the look of a "Ransom Note" made up of bits and pieces cut and pasted from all kinds of sources. This has never been considered a good design paradigm by anyone, anywhere. Pretty sad for a book on DESIGN patterns.

Comments about oreilly Swing Hacks:

Right in the beginning of the book it states that some of the examples in this book "are just plain silly, in print only to prove it could be done".

However, I have found that most of the examples in this book (even if they seem silly at first) are real eye-openers to possible ideas for my own Swing applications.

If you use the book code as it was written, it probably won't do what you want. But since this is a book about hacks, keep hacking the code and you will get what you want (as even suggested in the text for most of the hacks in the book)!

This book does assume some knowledge of Swing, but I don't know why anyone who has never written a serious Swing app would be looking at this book in the first place. For those of us that have (and still are) writing Swing apps, this book is a godsend. I just wish it had more hacks, like how to get an IconImage to appear in the title of a non-resizable JDialog!

Comments about oreilly Swing Hacks:

I've got to say this is my only experience with a bad O'REILLY book!

After a very quick review at my local bookstore, I was very excited with the various hack descriptions.

I'm thinking that's apparently the exact thing that happened to the editor, because when you get into the actual guts of the various "hacks" you find them to be more "kludge" than anything useful.

I'm most disappointed with the "examples" zip you can download, as it seems to be missing over half of the images used in the book which makes the example code fairly useless if you want to replicate the figures from the book.

All and all, there are some useful tidbits that you can get out of the material, but it's nowhere near the "reference" quality I'm used to seeing in O'REILLY books.

Maybe I was looking for something along the O'REILLY "Cookbook" line of books, that focus on reference quality code examples.

I have to admit that the book does clearly say "Tips & Tools" right on the cover, but I'd say it leans more towards Tips than real Tools.

Just be aware,

-Zac Morris

www.zacwolf.com

Comments about oreilly Swing Hacks:

Awesome. This is a Swing book unlike any other.

It doesn't regurgitate the entire API for every

Swing widget -- there are lots of other books that

do that -- but rather, this book provides particular

complete pieces of code that do AMAZING things.

Some show how easily to create cool visually rich

customizations that work the way Swing was designed

to be used, while others are clever tricks that do

stuff that the Swing designers obviously never

intended!

I love the way the examples are minimal yet

complete. It's code that can easily be hacked

into an already-existing application.

It's time for Java apps to surge back onto the

desktop. This book is gonna help make that happen.