Buy this book only if you are a beginner

Subject:		Buy this book only if you are a beginner
Date:		2004-12-31 22:15:00
From:		ldesegur

Rating: I like SWT. It's easier to use than Swing and looks better than AWT. However there are a few things that are done differently and this book tells you most of it. However, the books stops right here and there is not much meat after you done with the basics. The first problem I find with this book it that it's trying to be too broad. Explanations on when to use named inner classes to avoid code duplication have nothing to do in a notebook manual. It's a waste of space, people picking up this volume should already be acquainted to Java language. I didn't find the more interesting stuff I was looking for (i.e. customizable and resizable toolbars) It's already in eclipse IDE, so I guess I will have to do some digging in the code instead of relying on this book. No treatment of internationalization, serialization of widgets for archiving, and missing some important GUI design issues. Absolutly no references on flags you can pass. It's important because you need to use flags wiht constructors a lot in SWT. If you try the examples, you will find some bugs. In the layout chapter, the examples don't mention the shell.pack() method which causes all the examples to fail. Some other bugs at various places. They are easy to spot, so editing was probably sloppy. Explanation on the menus is vague. It would have been nice to add some diagrams explaning the cascade vs. pulldown mechanisms for adding items. In conclusion, buy this book if you are a beginner at Java and GUI programming. If not, then online tutorials will bring you what you need to write your apps.