Reddit reviews Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications

You missed:

Filthy Rich Clients

http://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applications/dp/0132413930

Not so relevant now that JavaFx is here, but still a good way to understand how to properly write Swing code that doesn't put Java to shame.

Java Concurrency in Practice

http://www.amazon.com/Java-Concurrency-Practice-Brian-Goetz/dp/0321349601

A must read for anyone writing multicore code on the JVM.

Look for a good simple book on swing and get reading. It sounds like a reasonably simple project so you probably won't need to read a huge amount of a book to get enough basics together to make a working assignment but it's up to you and how far you want to go.

I like this book but I can't say how it would read to a beginner since I already had a lot of experience with Java in general before I picked it up. Good luck mate

I also highly recommend the book Filthy Rich Clients if you want to read up on this.

I recommend you get the book "Filthy Rich Clients".

edit: I assume I got downvoted because someone didn't think this was an actual book. It's a great book that will give this person a great overview of how graphical java applications work.