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I have spent a couple of years of my university course coding Java, and when it came to the final year project I had one reservation about using Java - Swing and AWT don't look good, and perform really badly for any application of size. I had heard about SWT and all that it offered, however I was still waiting for a book to be published. When this one became available I was sceptical about it claiming to be "The Definitive" when it was a first edition. How wrong was I... The book gives a brief summary of all the Java GUIs and their strengths and weaknesses and then gets stuck into SWT. With lots of examples (code is available on the publishers website), a clear layout and an easy writing style it's very easy to pick up and read. You can either read from start to finish, or if you are looking to accomplish certain tasks (like creatingn a preferences dialog / menu bar / progress bar), you can dip into the appropriate section (my preferred method). There is a downside to SWT. SWT is powerful, however it makes coding in the Model-View-Controller architecture difficult as well as some other tasks. Enter JFace... JFace abstracts on top of (the already abstracted) SWT. What took 10 lines with SWT, only takes 2 with JFace. You can link your interface to your data and not have to worry about synchronising the two. You'll still need the SWT knowledge, but it will make coding less tedious and hopefully tidier. You will need to know what you're doing with Java to understand this book - things like abstract classes, protected methods, interfaces etc should be familiar to you. If you've coded a GUI application before then this should be no problem. The standalone examples work, but you'll need some knowledge to integrate them into larger applications. This book is not a reference, and does not pretend to be - all the API code can be found on Elipse's (the creators of SWT/Jface), website. It is a very well rounded introduction to everything concerned with creating a fully working application. If any other publisher wants to know what the benchmark is for SWT/JFace books - it is this book. It is clear/concise and treats the reader as someone looking to improve the appearance/performance of their applications. Worth it's weight in gold to an experienced Java developer who is looking to advance their knowledge.
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