Book Review: Filthy Rich Clients - Swing made cool
Overview
Filthy Rich Clients
Filthy Rich Clients refers to ultra-graphically rich applications that ooze cool
This book, unlike a lot of other programming books, does exactly what it sets out to do, by the end of the book you will understand the most basic aspects of swing and how to get your application to look and feel fantastic. Not only that but the book is set out and written in a way that makes you want to read it from the fist page to the last, its not just a technical book you use as a reference but a technical book you actually enjoy reading!
That being said lets take a look at the book in a bit more detail.
Content
The content of this book may seemingly be about advanced swing effects but actually does a great job in taking anyone from swing basics right through to swing god!
It starts by introducing the fundamentals of swing, awt and to some extent any basic graphics toolkit. It then manages to take a very well paced tour through basic fundamentals, images, performance (possibly the most important thing is introduced early on) constantly building on the previous chapters so as you progress through the book you start to see benefit of all you have been reading coming together as your skills progress. In fact half way through you are manipulating images, drawing reflections and gradients and making some pretty nice looking swing interfaces.
During the second half of the book i found the pace started to pick up a bit, never to an unmanageable speed, rather like the authors were starting to get into the flow of the book. You move on to animation fundamentals, effects and then onto dynamic effects which brings everything together into a really cool final sample app. At this point you will have a text field that pulses red as someone enters the wrong text, screens that slide to reveal the next screen, video with reflection, screens that fade out and my personal favourite a JButton that morphs into an arrow when you press it!
By the end of this book I found myself sitting there wondering how on earth I had this amazingly cool GUI working and I actually understood what was going on.
Style
In what could be a first for any programming book I’ve read this book actually made me laugh, the personality of the authors really comes through. A prime example of this light hearted approach to technical writing comes in one of the basic drawing sections, creating a circle with a smaller circle inside gives you a graphical doughnut. Normally this wouldn’t raise an eye but a small number by the word doughnut leads you to a footnote that reads:
“mmm, doughnuts”
Whilst the may not seem a work of comedy genius, when your 100 pages into a book on low level graphics routines a little comment like that always raises a smile and is a real novelty in a book like this, not that i don’t love foot notes that link to a website, that makes you sign up, that allows you to download a 300 page xml schema, with no documentation, to spend 10 years of your life trying to figure out, only to find it was a draft schema that is never used in the real world, those books are always good fun!
Examples
The examples in this book all come as NetBeans projects, not my favorite but not the end of the world, each chapter has samples, things to try and this is what i found really made me learn what was going on. The book is much more like a tutor than just something you read for tips or small bits of knowledge.
Better than all this you can, right now, go download the samples and have a go! Pop over to the filthy rich clients site and check out the examples for yourself.
Summary
Its a rare occurrence for me to find a book about programming that i want to read from the front to the back for the sake of entertainment, usually i just learn what i have to and move on. This book is easily the definitive book on creating cool swing interfaces but also understanding about swing under the hood so you get lightning fast user interfaces.
Don’t just take my word for it, go get a copy today of Filthy Rich Clients