Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This was an excellent book for classroom use. It is a useful not only as a learning tool, but as a reference as well. This is a book that will probably remain on my bookshelf for a while. The only complaint I have is that sometimes material may be difficult to find. Some terms are not included in the index that should have been. But these terms are few and far between, and do not take away from the overall excellence of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: CprE 486 Review
Review: This book is great for learning UML, or just as a reference. It also covers the basics of many design patterns, including their UML representations. The iterative design process is also a major subject. Information is easy to find, and explained well using examples. The point-of-sale system that is used as an example throughout the book is great because it can illustrate most parts of UML and uses the design patterns.
Rating: 
Summary: CprE 486 Review
Review: This book is very helpful in understanding object-oriented analysis and design. It is also very beneficial in understanding the concepts behind the unified process. It helps developers and students master the core principles and best practices of object-oriented analysis and design. I would recommend this book for use within a classroom environment and for reference in the workplace.
Rating:
Summary: my rEviEw
Review: This book was easy to follow. It's explanation was plain and simple..and quick to the point. It provided good examples for us to reference. The breakdown of chapters/separation of info flowed well.
Rating:
Summary: Good for Object Oriented Programming Beginners
Review: I was brand new to Object Oriented programming and this book brings you along slowly walking you through UML(Unified Modeling Language) various interaction and sequence diagrams as well as introducing UP (Unified Process). It shows the development of a complete project throughout the book in the form of a Point of Sale system which allows you to see actual steps and diagrams for a system as it is in the different stages of analysis and design. In addition, it provides not just one way of doing things but rather, allows for alternatives to suit the specific type of project that you might be working on at that time. With numerous diagrams throughout and guiding you through 3+ elaboration iterations of the example system. This book allows the user flexibility in the implementation of UML and UP to fit their needs and is great for beginners to OO. Filled with figures and diagrams to use as examples and guidance from inception to elaboration it makes OO easy to learn for any beginner.
Rating:
Summary: A mush-have for all levels of software developers
Review: Let me start out by saying that I am out of words for praising this masterpiece. I normally don't write reviews for books but this one has forced me to do that. Spanning over 600 pages and 37/38 chapters, this book uses RUP's inception and analysis phases for building a POS(Point-Of-Sales) system and no wonder the title mentions the word "INTRODUCTION". Craig has covered RUP's essentials in terms of documentation and design, and has also provided extremely valueable tips for how much to document and what to document. Vision, use cases, requirements, design, software development plan, and software architecutre are some kind of documents that have actually been created for this POS project. All the code has been written in Java but point to be noted is that these are just snippets of classes and prototypes for methods. Don't expect to get a complete runnable source code as its not the objective of this book. UML has obviously been covered pretty heavily in this book. Almost every page contains some kind of diagram which reminds me to mention that the book has been organized and formatted in an extremely neat and clean manner. Looks like a lot of thought was put into its structure, format and organization which is just an icing, actually tons of icing, on the cake. Expect to find lots of sequence and interaction diagrams. They are not complex either which is again in total accordance with his approach of doing it piece by piece. In the end of the book, you will find lots of tips as to how to attack a project while being a system architect/designer and project manager. I will end this review by mentioning one more thing that I really loved and something that I have NEVER seen in the books that I have read: Each chapter has a quotation from some famous person which kinds of freshes-up one's mind before embarking on reading it. CRAIG: WELL-DONE !!! YO THE MAN :):) Good luck to all the future readers and reviewers for this book.
Rating:
Summary: content wise superb...but...
Review: Content wise this book is superb, hence it is one of THE texts in its field. However content doesn't necessarily translate into effective communication. As much as it pains me to say it, Larman is a terrible writer. His sentences tend to be badly structured and very disjointed (from trying to cram too many ideas or tangents). This is very off-putting at times and make the book somewhat boring, tedious and hard to read. And this seriously devalues his message, which is quite strong if you can get beyond his prose. As it typical of most 'experts' (a term I use loosely because expertise is only as valuable as it is needed), the apprent lack of plebian contact inffuses their writing with an akward impacticality and skewed audience indentificaton and targeting (this sentence is a intentional example of that). And if the audience doesn't connect with the material then the material is effectively useless. A good yardstick is this: if a smart sixeen year old can't understand it, then whatever you've written is badly written because you're too intelletcually arrogant or don't understand it well enough to be able to put it in terms of that level (analogy is an art). And every concept can be broken down into that level. Feynman could do it! This books teeters at time on the brink of failure because of this (intellectual arrogance I would suggest). Again, this is a shame because Larman obviously has a lot to value to say...He just needs to alter the voice he says it with. One idea per non-run-on sentence. It's amazing what a simple concept as this can do to a peice of work.
Rating:
Summary: Excelent to begin OOA/D
Review: This book is a great guide for an object-oriented project using UML and (R)UP. The book doesn't learn much of UML nor UP has the title said (Applying...not Learning...). I recommend read first some basic tutorials on UML as UML Distilled by Fowler and the introduction for RUP by Kruchten. Then, you can return to this one and get amazing. The book emphasizes in the business modeling, requirements and design disciplines (RUP), and clearly shows us how to convert a use case into a design model, applying patterns and the tools of UML in the best easy way. Sorry for the Phd that hates OOA/D. If you're in the precedural programming world (repeating code over and over again, no inheritance, no polimorphism, etc., etc.), why read this book? But if you want to get the idea of OOP and want some good advise in this jungle get this book! Definitely, one of the best and complete books I read of OOA/D: common UML, patterns, UP and lots of advices in a few pages.
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Summary: Excellent introduction to UML
Review: There are two books that I used at Uni and are now on my desk at work and get used regularly. This is one of them.
Chapter 38 - 'Persistent frameworks' was the most influential.
From this chapter I have built a persistent framework that auto generates appox 80 of my code and forms.
My only complaint was that it took some time to track down further information on the unresolved issues. Thankfully the author emailed me some useful leads. I am looking forward to his next book 'Applying Design Patterns in C#'...
Rating:
Summary: Very Good Introduction to OOAD, Patterns and UML
Review: This is a very good introductory level text on object-oriented software analysis and design, software patterns and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). I used this book to study for a certification test, but its worth reading even if you don't have a test hanging over your head. The writing is clear and the book is well organized with many useful diagrams and tables. Larman guides the reader through the most important phases of a software project using a point of sale (POS) system case study. The case study is well chosen because its problem domain is familiar to most people and it has enough interesting aspects to illustrate the use of the Unified Process, application of design patterns and the UML very well. Time reading this book will be well spent. You will not only bet a better understand of how to use the process and tools, but also why and when they are useful. I have only two minor criticisms: The index seems inadequate making it a little harder than necessary to use as a reference, and its bias toward the Java programming environment when reference is made to implementation specific issues.
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