Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs Review

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Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs ReviewI'm surprised that it's taken this many years for a book like this to make it to market. There are good Swing books available, but they rarely go beyond the basics. As soon as I heard about this one, I pre-ordered and began waiting.
It essentially consists of 99 power 'tricks' for creating WOW effects in your user interfaces. Some are eye candy that you'd probably never put in a production application, but I'd say 80%+ could be applied to every day app's. I'll be spending many hours pouring over the details of each hack to gain the deep insight offered by this book.
This book is going to allow me to reach the next level of Swing polish. I find it hard to believe that most people that consider themselves Swing developers wouldn't gain a lot from reading this book. Run, don't walk, and get this book.
There are a few minor disappointments, but I emphasis minor. The production quality seems a bit rushed as there was quite a few obvious errors in the preface alone, although not of a technical nature. Perhaps only the preface escaped any editing oversight, since the remainder of the book had nothing that jumped out at me.
As usual today, the examples are all available for download from OReilly's website. But I wonder why they didn't take the extra step of providing runnable versions of each hack. You have to compile each one - a minor annoyance. When browsing the book it would have been cool to be able to just double-click an associated jar file to see the effect in action.
The author clearly uses a Macintosh, since all (perhaps I missed one or two) the screen shots are from a Mac, and some of the Hacks relate to duplicating Mac OS features. Seeing that the majority of Swing applications are probably deployed on Windows machines, a bit more emphasis on Windows would have been more appropriate. And the screen shots could have used a cross-platform look-and-feel instead of the Mac OS.
In short summary, the good, the bad, and the ugly...
The Good: Insanely great tricks for getting the most out of Swing.
The Bad: Perhaps too much Macintosh focus and not enough Windows (XP).
The Ugly: Probably a bit rushed out the door since there are some glaring production mistakes, like chapter summaries without the chapter names or numbers, etc.Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs Overview

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