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SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1 Review by Alexander Garrett
Best book for the details -- and you'll need them!
First, a caveat -- this book only covers SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit, and not JFace. Presumably, JFace will be covered in a forthcoming book. That said, using JFace well requires a good knowledge of SWT, so it would be a mistake to avoid this book just because it doesn't include JFace topics.
This book was written by Steve Northover, one of the architects of SWT, and Northover's profound knowledge of SWT is evident on every page. He communicates clearly and efficiently the details that you need to know in order to be a good SWT programmer. Understanding event-driven programming is skill of a different order than "regular" programming. Operations aren't as neatly sequenced in the former and, as a result, both programming and debugging can be more difficult, especially for one not used to the programming style. Northover spends a lot of time covering the internals of SWT and making sure that things like the Display and Controls are clearly explained, rather than simply providing examples of how to write an address book in SWT, or something equally useless.
After finishing this book you'll have a solid knowledge of how SWT works and how to write SWT applications that are performant and reasonably defect-free. You'll have an understanding of how the SWT framework works and why certain design choices were made. This knowledge will help you write applications that naturally extend SWT, rather than bending it into a shape it wasn't meant to assume.
I've read Manning's "SWT/JFace in Action" and Apress' "The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace" as well as this book. Additionally, I'm on a project where we're building a complicated Java client using SWT/JFace and I spend about 30 hours each week up to the elbows in GUI coding. I'm fortunate that I had the opportunity to read Northover's book. Unfortunately, it was the last book I read. If I had read it first, there are a lot of things I would have done differently. Well, there's always refactoring. :)