Rating: 
Summary: An excellent introductory grammar of the language
Review: When you read a book, you must understand the type of book it is. If you approach a satire as a serious treatise, a fantasy as a history, or a telephone directory as a novel, your expectations will not be met and your review of the book will be flawed. You determine the type of book--the genre--by combining the book's own clues (statements by the author) with your experience in literature of all types (what "patterns" does this book share with other things I've read?). You may have to read the book once, reflect on the distance between what you expect and what the book provides, and then--well, then you have to choose. You can condemn the book as unfruitful and disappointing, or revise your expectations according to the book's genre. The UML User Guide has forced me to do this revision. On first reading--a close and careful reading--I expected a different book, and was disappointed by the book. Yet the authors are not incompetent: their other works are classics (don't look for tight logic here--anyone can produce a clunker). What sort of book is this? The text is repetitive, both in chapter structure and in content. The material is simple, and barely touches the complexities of real-life modeling. The book is long, covering lots of ground, without digging more than a few centimeters deep at any one point. Where have I seen this before? In my introductory Hebrew class, I learned that there were two tenses in Hebrew, past and future. I dealt with shallow topics like, "This is the [male] horse of the king," "The king hit the horse of the city," "The [female] horse will kill the king," until I could scream. Every chapter had a topic, examples, review, exercises. The book itself covered about all topics of Hebrew grammar, without going very much into depth, and without discussing how to compose (or just read) a historical book, a Psalm, or a prophesy about a neighboring country. Later, in other courses and other texts, that "past and future" expanded into several pages of subtle shades of meaning; "the king's horse" was swallowed up in the majesty of, "In the year of the death of King Uzziah, I saw the LORD high and lifted up"; whole courses were devoted to certain Psalms, whole books to a single prophet. And it all became possible because of the irritating repetition of that first Hebrew textbook. Like my Hebrew text, the User Guide is a "prescriptive" introductory grammar. It introduces you to the whole framework of the UML, adds some hints and details, and gives you enough training to compose diagrams about object-oriented kings with an aggregated [male] horses. It does this with the (potentially irritating) repetition appropriate to a book that is laying a foundation, brick by brick. The experienced developer may find that it is simple where she has encountered complexity and it gives answers where she has found questions; yet it may give her a footing she doesn't yet have, but will appreciate in a future project.
Rating: 
Summary: Big thumbs down
Review: To put it simply - bloody awful!
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding reference for OO Architects
Review: A few months ago I've successfully completed an OO project. I used this book everyday for both analysis and design. It brought me new vision about some details and problems to dodge in my everyday's work. I confirm my first review: this book is really outstanding. UML concepts are explained thoroughly and clearly, even the most abstract concepts. PLUS, he gives you miscellaneous tips on how-to go more deeply in your analysis and design processing. Grady Booch gives you his experiences and feelings in OO technology; take it ... it's so valuable. All about UML is in this book. Buy it, read it and take whatever you want and apply it to your IT/OO problems ... you will be sucessful. Believe me Grady Booch is a great man/mentor as his colleagues Ivar Jacobson & James Rumbaugh, whose I used their notation and methodology before (OOSE & OMT). Amigos' books are references respecting UML. I am really surprise about bad reviews posted previously. Don't forget this book is just a User Guide; it won't fix any analysis or design for you. If you have appreciated Object-Oriented Analysis & Design with Applications and Object Solutions ... you will like this book.
Rating:
Summary: Save your money
Review: I am currently trying to get to grips with UML at university. This is the recommended text. Literally every other student I have spoken to finds this book pointless, dry, vague and inevitably irritating. There is no advice on how to apply these ideas to the real world. (Note to the authors:Hey guys, have you ever heard the phrase 'learning by doing'? These concepts have little value if we are not give any insight into their practicality)What a terrible, terrible book! £35.99...what a waste of my hard-earned money!
Rating:
Summary: Definitive work on UML
Review: I am currently an instructor at the University of West Florida and I am leading a class on Object-Oriented Design Patterns. We are modeling the patterns we are exploring using UML. Visually modeling the patterns in UML has greatly increased our understanding of the relationships and collaborations between the various classes, which has enhanced our understanding of the patterns. I have used Booch's book on UML as a guide for teaching UML to the class, as it is still the best book available on UML. It is not a book to teach OO. You still need to read a book on Object-Oriented concepts such as Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications by Booch or Object-Oriented Modeling and Design by Rumbaugh to get an understanding of what you are trying to model.
Rating:
Summary: This is a User's Guide: What Else Should You Expect!!
Review: This is what the title claims it is - a users guide. I think what is missing and what should come next is a good 3-level interactive tutorial: beginners, intermediate, advanced. All of the other 125 UML 'books' I have read are either way too shallow (e.g. UML Distilled) or way too language (e.g. with Java) dependent!! That is, to be strictly a UML users guide. The next books should be generically titled UML Interactive Tutorial: Intermediate. If you are a computer language theorist, this will not be the reference you need because it does not technically address those issues. So ... read the more technical papers!! To be more complete, you should have the entire set of AWL UML books on your shelf, not just this one. More to follow ...
Rating: 
Summary: Not very good.
Review: Book is full of repeative sentences, every thing is told many times. Very flustrating to read. Too much things about modeling-process itself and not about UML. The content of this book would need only 100 pages, not 450.
Rating:
Summary: A sturdy cover, around 480 pages of blank paper.
Review: The Preface in the book is basically a declaration of its uselessness. Most of the examples were vague and conceptualized. They appear as if they were deliberately designed to agree with the author's assertions, not to solve real problems. I also wasted my money on the Reference Manual, which offers a disk via the mail, which was never sent to me. I was dissapointed to see Rumbaugh's name on this one, since I found his book "Object-Oriented Modeling and Design" to be excellent. Bertrand Meyer's book "Object Oriented Software Construction" is another good choice.
Rating:
Summary: It is a really ugly book.
Review: This is a really ugly book. The sample case have and will NEVER happen in real life. Just like previous reviewer said, if you know anything about object modeling this book is a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: A Useless Book- whichever way you want to use it
Review: This is not "The Ultimate Tutorial" written on the subject, and certainly does not help as a "USER GUIDE". An ironical downswing, more so after one expects standards set by Booch's earlier "Object Oriented Analysis and Design". Yes, every chapter in this book is structured in the same way, but wow! What a structured redundancy! There are several repetitions, some word-by-word and very, very irritating! It seems less of a tutorial, and more of a reference book. And the preface mentions that "each (chapter) builds upon the content of the previous one, thus lending itself to a linear progression". Let us investigate what kinds of readers can this book help. If you are already knowledgeable in Object Oriented Concepts and Development, then you already use some kind of notation in your work and are looking for an introduction to the UML notation. The only chapters useful for you in this book are the appendices and you can always refer to them in a library. This book will add nothing to your knowledge of OO-concepts and it's 500-page introduction to UML notation is most likely not worth the time required. I strictly advise you against buying this book. If you are not knowledgeable in Object Oriented Concepts, then reading this book is not going to add anything to your knowledge. A better book would be something like "Object Oriented Analysis and Design" by Booch, and supplemented with some small book on UML (I am also searching for a small book, by the way). In this case also, I strictly advise you against buying this book. Most of what the book contains could be compressed and presented in a 100-page book, written with some respect to readability and professional quality. At the end of it all, one sighs- What a waste!- and the authors are the very people who developed the UML standard. (I can't end without mentioning this- there are some places in the book where there are abrupt changes in font sizes. Bravo! But don't keep it up!)
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