Robert Eckstein

The WYSIWYGs for Swing have greatly improved since this book was published making GUI development less tedious. Still, that is just the broad strokes, this book explains it all and gives great code samples.

This is probably the first book I read from O'Reilly. If not the first, then definitely the second. The company I was working for wanted to implement a Samba server. I learned a lot about implementing Samba technology from this single book. In my opinion, O'Reilly is really the top publisher for books about technology.

Another "definitive" reference from O'Reilly. There is a newer edition but I still refer to this regularly,