This book fails to quickly bring new Swing developers up to speed with practical examples early on. Its front-loaded with way too much info (that should come later) before you actually get into practical material half way through the book that presents the actual swing components. It works, its accurate, but it really tried my patience. Get another book.

This is a useful and well-written book. His examples are clear and helpful.

Unlike other books that throw the API at you, this has excellent examples.

You do have to wade through some of the usual "This extends that, which extends that, which implements that," but the examples make it worth it.

I was surprised by the mediocre reviews that I saw here. My guess is that these reviews come from people who need Sun's tutorial to get started.

If you are not already familiar with the precise technical meaning (in Swing/AWT) of terms such as window, frame, dialog, component, and container, or not already familiar with AWT, you will find the introductory chapters tough going. The term "Definitive" in the title is certainly misleading.

Also be prepared for syntax errors in the code samples and poorly organized (and confusing) section headers, not to mention prose that seems to make little sense.

I found this book to be of little value. I did not gain any additional knowledge beyond what can be found in the javadoc and tutorials. It is also extremely dry and didn't really demonstrate an advanced understanding of swing. I bought this book when I first started with Swing and quickly had to replace it with one of the far better books that are available.

'The Definitive Guide to Java Swing' by John Zukowski is a bloated book that just isn't worth the price. I found the content to be alright most of the time in this 900 page doorstop, but the lack of many GOOD examples and poor layout really hurts this book. One of the things that drives me nuts about apress books is the lack of color within their texts, while so many competing publishers produce books that jump out and make you WANT to read what lies within. Dark grey mixes with black and white in the sparse dialogs that are contained within, and for a book that talks about the GUI technology of Swing, you would figure that this would not be the case.

There's nothing overtly that makes this book outright poor, I just feel that there are probably other choices on the shelf for Java Swing that would be better used as a reference manual or teaching tool.

Apress, you need to learn the word BREVITY. Not only will you save $$$ on less pages to print, edit and ship, but this will make for a tighter book that will sell better.

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