Up to Speed with Swing

Stephen Gutz's competent book about one of Java's graphical user interface (GUI)-building technologies covers everything you'd want in a Swing book--layouts, events, all the components, and more. Gutz focuses on the interface components, detailing buttons, text elements, and tables. Throughout, his code is clear and easy to follow, and a chapter about look-and-feel programming is excellent.

The Web resources that support this book are what distinguish it from the crowd of Swing books. Gutz monitors and participates in a question-and-answer forum on the Manning site. Java programmers post questions in this forum, and other programmers--including Gutz, who seems quite active--reply with solutions and advice. The site appears to be quite heavily used, yet with a good signal-to-noise ratio. The Q&A forum is only one piece of the site--it also features the illustrative code from the book, an errata page, and an Adobe Acrobat copy of the text. The publisher restricts access to the Web site by prompting you for a particular word from the book before assigning you a username and password.

Thanks to the Web site and Gutz's participation there, it's almost as though you get free consulting time when you buy this book. --David Wall