If this book were named "A Beginner's Guide to GUI Programming in Java", then the very entry level nature of the content would be acceptable. But it isn't. It is supposed to be a Developer's Notebook, which is geared towards experienced developers. When it comes to addressing the needs of that audience, the book fails miserably at its goal, and sometimes even makes you downright angry to read because of the author's often very patronizing statements. As an example, the author makes the statements at one point "Menus are the primary application navigation tool you provide for your users", and in another section "Most toolbars use images instead of text"... Does the author think we have never used a GUI application before?

On the back cover of the book, it says "You already know what you want to do, so wading through the basics of user interface design, graphical components, and what a button does is simply a waste of time." And yet thats exactly what the author does at the start of each chapter. Explaning what a menu is, what a toolbar is, what a button is, etc.--stuff that the average computer user already knows, even if they aren't a developer.

As you get closer to the end of the book, you start to notice that the author begins duplicating code more often, sometimes taking up three pages with irrelevant code to demonstrate a new concept that involves 3 or 4 lines of code. I suspect the author was getting close to the end of the book and needed to bulk up the page count to make up for the fact that the coverage of the various SWT widgets is so simplistic. In books for begining programmers, presenting examples in the context of a complete working program has value. But in books for experienced programmers, it is filler that does nothing except waste trees and bulk up the page count.

And now on to the simplistic nature of the content: Only the basic widgets are covered. And even the ones that are covered are not covered with the kind of depth they should be. The RowData class to go with the RowLayout manager is not covered at all for example. SashForm for building split panes--a very common user interface element, is not mentioned at all. Instead, the author uses a FillLayout which fixes the divider at 50%, when he should have used a SashForm. And if you want to do anything with images besides put them in a toolbar buttons, you can forget about it. The graphics package in SWT is given no coverage at all outside of changing the application icon, and putting an image in a toolbar.

This is not a horribly bad book, except for the fact that it is very misadvertised. it is not for experienced developers, but for people who have never written a GUI in their life, and people who have little experience in Java in general. If that's you, this book might help you learn how to develop basic GUI applications with SWT. But if you are an experienced developer, this book will mostly just frustrate you with its very basic coverage, patronizing style, and duplicate code listings.

For a quick introduction to SWT, this book does nicely. It starts with some very clear instructions for preparing the eclipse IDE for running the SWT examples. The author focuses on the main graphical components within SWT such as the menu components, toolbars, buttons, text fields, lists, layouts, and tables. The format of the book is a bridge for experienced Java developers that are already familiar with GUI development.

However, this book does not teach graphical interface design principles; you will need to know interface conventions. It does not contrast and compare the functionality of Swing with SWT. The pacing of the book is a little slow. For advanced topics, you may need to look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the examples contain numerous bugs. This is a bit off-putting for a tutorial. It would have been nice if the source was organized as an eclipse project and included the referenced graphics. While this book is a little narrow in its focus, it does provide some nice pointers about SWT. Despite some shortcomings, this is a useful resource for learning about SWT.

This book is an excellent book for beginners. In fact, it is a well-organized quick reference. Starting from how to build a shell, this book goes through visual component-wise chapters. That means after each chapter, the reader is supposed to learn one new visual component.

There is always a short piece of code for each chapter, which merely shows the basic usage of that visual component.

In general, this notebook is clear and easy to follow. Chapters are arranged with intuitive sense so readers are not going to lose themselves and everybody should be able to achieve the basic control of SWT in a couple of hours.

However, it will be better to add some more graphic illustration. E.g. it would be much better to draw a few lines and boxes to show the secret of Menu and MenuItem instead of text-only explanation.

Please be reminded that, this notebook is for beginner only.

The author is bang on same issue over and over throughout entire book, page 108, for example, contains following 3 consecutive section:

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As with all widgets, the first step in using a list is to create the List object-an instance of the List class-then position the list within the container as desired. Once a List object has been created, it can be populated with items.

To create a list you must create an instance of the List class, passing the constructor a reference to a shell or other container, and specifying the style of list you wish to create.

The code in Example 7-1 should be familiar due to its similarity to the code required to create the examples from earlier chapters. As with all widgets, you first create an instance of List, passing a reference to the container and the desired style attributes. The following creates a single selection list with a border:
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I'm totally off with this.

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. The books stops short and there is not much meat after you are done with the basics.

The first problem that 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 the 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.

Absolutely no references on flags you can pass. It's important because you need to use flags with 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 explaining the cascade vs. pull-down 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.