Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Reference Guide to UML
Review: I found the UML Language Reference Guide to be an invaluablework for understanding UML in greater depth. I frequently return to itas a source of UML modeling information. It's concise, practical, very readable, and serves as an excellent reference for those interested in more advanced material, without the hazards posed by many academically oriented books on the topic.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference Guide to UML
Review: I found the UML Language Reference Guide to be an invaluable work for understanding UML in greater depth. I frequently return to it as a source of UML modeling information. It's concise, practical, very readable, and serves as an excellent reference for those interested in more advanced material, without the hazards posed by many academically oriented books on the topic.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Guide
Review: The book is an excellent introduction to UML. It does have a college textbook style though. What bugs me the most is that the treatment of UML flows from structural to behavioral. The authors treat basic and advanced structural modeling before they even pick up use-cases and basic behavioral modeling. This is not how the real world works. In projects, during the first iteration, a lot more of behavioral modelling is done to gather user requirements. It would be more helpful if the book aligned itself to this Unified Process.
Rating:
Summary: Robot as author?
Review: Systematic like the output of a robot. Every chapter has the same structure without any creativity. But it's good, because it introduces UML from the ground up so that one can apply it for practical purposes. And it's also good, because it's from one of the founders and by reading the founders books, one may look behind the scenes, here only by realising how extremely systematic Booch is.
Rating:
Summary: Ideal for the interested novice
Review: "The Unified Modeling Language User Guide" really starts from the beginning. Apparently the reader is assumed to be totally unfamiliar with object oriented design. The book starts with the very basics, and explains a reasonably complete set of UML. The really advanced and esoteric features are not explained. Each chapter is written like a good lecture. It starts from the very beginning assuming no previous knowledge of OO. Then one aspect of UML is carefully explained. Every chapter ends with some concluding remarks and "hints and tips". This organization is mostly good, but it adds a lot of repetition to the book. The language is smooth and easy to read. It might still be a struggle to get read the book simply because of the amount of text (and repetition). I would recommend this book to the interested novice. However, if you are reasonably familiar with UML, or if you have a solid foundation in object oriented programming, then I would recommend you the combination of "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler and "The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual" by James Rumbaugh et.al.
Rating: 
Summary: Beyond UML - The Shortcomings of Object Modeling
Review: Unfortunately, this is one of the poorest books I have ever read. To begin with, the langauge is stilted and difficult to follow. It is as if the authors wrote the book in a different language and then translated the work into English. If the purpose is to communicate concepts, the work falls short for this reason. The primary difficultly with the work lies in some of the assumptions of the unified process. First, analysis and the upper lifecycle of systems development are treated very cavalierly. The attitude is that analysis is okay and may yield some valuable information, but you should be able to go right into design without wasting all that time in analysis. My 11 years of professional experience indicates otherwise. The next difficultly is communication between various audiences. UML is touted as the most effective diagramming technique for communicating both business and software concepts. Yet the modeling techniques are severely lacking in techniques for capturing fundemental business information. In addition, many of the concepts presented are very esoteric and peculiar to object modeling and are not easily applied to the business world or even to transaction-based software applications. There is also a concerted effort to ignore many valuable techniques developed in such disciplines as Information Engineering, Structured Analysis and Design, etc. The UML will be a mature enough modeling language only after these missing pieces have been incorporated. If you want to familiarize yourself with the buzz words of the object community, buy the book. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend wasting your money.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Sad
Review: This book is almost more of a reference than a using guide. As a big Booch fan, it is sad to see so little useful information about advanced modeling and so many disconnected, minute examples. Each example is incredibly elided. Much more like you would expect to see in a reference. There isn't a single complete modeling example, something with multiple views - class, state, package, etc. Very disunited. It would have been nice to see something that lived up to the great promise of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Unfortunately, it seems like we always loose 'em when they cross too far over into "pundit" and "promoter" land. Maybe for a subsequent book, Mr. Booch could take something like his temperature control system from OOA&D and go through each model type using the same classes, objects, states, packages, etcetera - seeing an entire system, incrementally realized by the use of UML. Instead, we have a bunch of unfinished, disconnected, bits and pieces.
Rating:
Summary: Definitive to an extreme
Review: Who other than the inventors of the Unified Modeling Language to write the definitive guide to it? Booch, Jacobson, and Rumbaugh have answered the call with this book describing UML syntax, semantics, and diagrams with great detail. Throughout the book, the authors draw parallels to building architecture for corresponding UML elements for software architecture. There's effective use of two-color printing to distinguish metadiscourse and metadiagrams from actual UML diagrams. And it's deep: VERY deep. The authors explore nearly every use of every UML element, covering things that most users of UML will never use. In that regard, this book makes a better reference manual than a user's guide. I'd recommend getting this book to sit on the shelf when you have questions or want to solve an ambiguity, but stick with Martin Fowler's "UML Distilled" for the core UML that you'll use day-to-day.
Rating:
Summary: For Serious Software Developers Only
Review: This book is by far one of the best textbooks I have ever read. It has a clear, consistent organization of each chapter throughout the book. I really enjoyed the books iterative format in which concepts and terminology were briefly introduced, and then brought up time and again to build on earlier lessons. It is a great way to learn because the overall picture is given from the beginning and then expanded upon throughout the book. Another plus to this book is the many mini-tutorials on how to apply the UML to real world problems. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is serious about becoming a better software developer.
Rating:
Summary: Very good UML guide
Review: The book is a good overview of all the basic UML concepts, and illustrates in a very simple way how UML can be applied to develop software systems.
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