It's a little difficult to place this book. I came away with the sense that while the goals were well intentioned, and the coverage of SWT itself left me feeling a little...wanting.
The ordering of the chapters were a little hop-scotched. While "Shells" are a good place to start, and menu's are a logical follow-on, jumping to toolbars as the third chapter does, leaves you with a feeling of "Huh?". I think the layout chapter should've come much earlier in the book, perhaps after introducing a couple of the more basic controls.
Before even discussing shells, I think a bit more introduction on a couple of topics was warranted. Since these topics have more to do with Eclipse than SWT, I ask your indulgence. While you CAN develop for SWT without Eclipse, frankly how many of us don't take maximum advantage of the facilities of the IDE's to do much of the tedium in creating the infrastrcture of our projects. This is where the SWT Developer's Notebook falls a little short.
Yes, to the purist, thinking of the "Notebook" series as being a sequence of notes and clear cut examples for how to do things, this might sound like a departure from the intended form. But, it's one that I think would've been well suited here. As an example, I point out the Eclipse Cookbook ( also from O'Reilly press, released just a few months ago ), which does go into this topic, if not in depth, just enough to help the novice get going. It's not like there was NO information, but rather that what little there was ; was just plain disjointed. Sure, it's nice to be shown how you can have the path to the SWT jar's to the libraries added to your build libraries ( and the where the SWT DLL's are for the classpath ), but there's no mention of how to kickstart your first SWT project.
There was also simply NO mention of any of the available visual editors: Jigloo by CloudGarden, SWT Designer by Instantiations, SWT Workbench, and the Eclipse Project's own Visual Editor, most of which have been around for quite a while. Some Java purists will surely decry, "I do my UI in code, by hand". Apparently those dinosaurs haven't
been exposed to other RAD-based development environments ( or they're simply not doing that much UI-based work ). However, for those who are, and have been, having a UI design tool these days, is almost indispensible. Sure, this book isn't meant to be an ad for any of those products, but since this book is about the UI library provided by Eclipse, it bore mentioning.
I also felt strongly that anyone who wants to make use of the samples in this book, should've had a them available for download. As of writing of this review ( 10/31/2004 ), they're still not up on the O'Reilly site.
Now that I've thrashed about those points that I didn't like, let me tell you what I did like. I likes that the chapters, in and of themselves, were streamlined, and not full of fluff. The examples were succcinct and to the point.
This Developer's Notebook ( of the three that I own so far, the Mono Developers Notebook, and Tiger 1.5 Java Notebook being the other two ) is the only one that left me with the feeling of a spy novel that leaves you wanting. It's a good start for a series, and I think it's laid down reasonable ground to develop an "SWT Developer's Second Notebook". Topics as the custom controls library ( and a little JFACE wouldn't hurt ), such as the TableTree, CLabel, and CCombo controls, just to name a few, come to mind. Another area just waiting to be explored is the interopability layer built into SWT ( SWT_AWT ) which allows you to embed SWING/SWT controls, within an SWT composite ( also briefly discussed in the Eclipse Cookbook ). Perhaps the authors will consider this, and expand this series. In summary, it's a good primer despite it's rough edges, let's just hope there's a sequel.
Marcelo R. Lopez, Jr.
10/31/2004
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