poorly strucured and organized

"SWT/JFace in Action" proceeds to build a monolithic UI "application" consisting of a dozen or so widgets. Other than creating the widgets and putting them into an application, the book has little else to offer. Many chapters include tables of descriptions copied verbatim from the SWT/JFace Javadocs, with no additional verbage provided. There is very little coverage of event handling, or layouts. After presenting pages of vacuous descriptions like "setActionDefinitionID(String) - Sets an Action definition identifier" (p.73), each chapter concludes with the absurd statement "Now you are an expert." It would be funny if you had not just wasted $30 on the book.

The silliest chapter is that of image-handling which contains a bizarre program to generate and save animated GIFs as files (why is this important to UIs?). After plodding through the process of generating images pixel-by-pixel (does anyone generate images pixel-by-pixel? doesnt everyone use methods to draw lines, arcs, elipses, & polygons?) the authors present a program to produce animated GIFs as files. The code contains strings of bytes (e.g., new byte[] {56, -67, 98, 54, -4, 2 }) with no explanation. My impression is that the author had this program on his PC and could not think of anything else to do with it but to include it in the book. The highlight is when the animated GIF is placed into the main application and the author comments that unfortunately, SWT does not provide functionality to animate it. LOL.

I recommend that you read the Javadocs before you buy this book. If you need additional help, look for a reference other than this book.

Other Reviews

• Suitable beginner introduction, after that you're on your own
• Poor reference
• poorly strucured and organized
• Great fundamentals on JFace frameworks
• A worthy addition to my bookcase.