Swing Hacks
an O'Reilly book teaching you how to hack the Swing Java UI toolkit one step beyond.
In 2005, I co-wrote the O'Reilly book Swing Hacks with Chris Adamson. The book shows you how to push what is possible with Swing, the then popular UI toolkit for desktop Java applications.
Swing Hacks was a success by tech book standards, was translated into Japanese and Portuguese (Java was huge in Brazil then) and still pays me royalties two decades later.
Amazon's listing for the Japanese translation
Swing Hacks covered how to do extreme things with the UI toolkit, things the original authors never intended to build but gave developers the hooks to do it themselves. Crazy things like weirdly styled JLabels, transparent windows, and magnifying glasses using the screen capture API.
Swing Hacks was my first large writing project and directly led to be being hired by Sun to work on the Swing team itself, where I improved Swing, the Netbeans GUI editor, and then worked on Swing's successor, JavaFX.
Though 20 years old it has still inspired other developers. Here's a reworked example from 2019.