Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs (Hacks)

It met my test because what I needed to know was easy to find and I was able to make a quick fix while maintaining Java software and I knocked out a couple of problems that way. It was easy to read, a good index and had sample implementations. The only problem I found is that it seems out of date and I would gladly purchase a more recent edition.

Lacking some up-to-date information is usually not a problem that impacts most books. You can usually pull out one or two decent tricks, methodologies or pieces of information you didn't know before. This book, however, falls flat on its face.

Filled with completely useless "hacks", use of extremely common knowledge/practices and general lack of content make this book a complete waste. Beginners may find the information interesting, but in terms of use in their professional lives, useless. Advanced users will find that other methodologies and "hacks" out there are much more useful and function much more efficiently.

Aside from the uselessness of the information provided for use within enterprise GUI front-ends, what bothered me most was the inefficiency of the data provided. With some simple tweaking, complete rewrites based on the ideas presented, etc. you can come up with much more efficient and powerful components and component extensions yourselves.

Don't waste your time.

This book gives a good set of more in depth approaches to building GUI in Swing. While reading it I had a lot of 'that's interesting' moments. However, a lot of the examples feel more like an idea of what needs to be done to achieve something rather than a complete (and robust) implementation. What is more disappointing, I found that some advice in the book is misleading. For example Hack #57 demonstrates how to use the glass pane to intercept and riderect mouse events. Unfortunately, as demonstrated, this approach doesn't work at all in the applications that use any components that have menus. A very significant shortcoming, in my opinion, that is not mentioned in the book.

This book had ways of implementing all the useful features that users expect such as drag and drop, transparent/non-rectangular frames, and lots of other things. Well worth the money

Along with Swing Hacks I bought Swing Second Edition by Robinson and Vorobiev. What a contrast! Marinacci gives concise, fascinating, and useful examples. He leaves out the junk that you can get from reading the API. His hacks are short and remarkably clear. And if a hack doesn't interest you, you can just skip it.

In contrast, R&V dump a ton of junk on you, and you have to sift through it. Most of it is a rehash of the API, plus deadly boring chit-chat about what extends what. You can read and read and read and not learn anything useful.

I'd rank Marinacci up at the top with the Effective Java, the Swing Tutorial and Thinking in Java.