As soon as I heard about Griffon in Action, I was eager to get it into my hands. What I expected was a typical Manning In Action book: providing an easy jump start, working from actionable examples, and providing lots of insight about the technology at hand. It turned out that this book not only lived up to my expectations, it exceeded them in many ways.

First, the authors’ knowledge is indisputable. This is obvious for the technology, because we’re talking about main Griffon contributors. But beyond that comes experience about all aspects of developing desktop applications based on Swing, ranging from how to set up your project, through proper separation of concerns, threading, building, testing, visual composition, and code metrics, down to how to deliver the final application to the customer.

Second, the book goes beyond giving simple recipes. It explains the underlying constraints and considerations that enable readers to make informed decisions about their projects.

Third, Griffon in Action is a great reference. I have it open whenever I write Griffon applications so I can quickly look up an example or a list of available goodies. It is such a thorough source of information that I consider it the definitive guide.

Writing such a book is a huge effort—especially when aiming for approachability and completeness at the same time. Additionally, the authors pushed the Griffon project forward while writing this book, and one or the other may even have an additional day job.