Rating: 
Summary: Long and obscure.
Review: The name "UML Weekend Crash Course" is misleading. I don't think anyone can read and understand it in one weekend, unless of course he is reading about six times faster than me. This book has long and obscure sentences and too much of unnecessary information. The chapter on Object-Oriented principles is written so badly, that I doubt in the authors competence. It mentions two major OO postulates "encapsulation" and "inheritance" but leaves out the third one "polymorphism". But he rumbles on for pages about some unrelated stuff. Also, this book was published before the UML-2 standard came out, so it is somewhat outdated. I would recommend "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler instead of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent crash course for beginners or experts
Review: This book hits on all the UML fundamentals and will make more indepth books (the Addison-Wesley books by 3 the amigos and others) more accessible to you.
The examples in this book were clear and easy to relate to. If you have a CASE tool by your side when you read this, you'll get the most out of the book. You're going to need to get familiar with such a tool if you want to put UML to work for your projects.
The CD that ships with the book comes with Popkin's System Architect and Embarcadero's Describe.
I installed Popkin's tool as most of the examples in the book were created with it. This tool was easy to use and had an excellent tutorial of its own on UML.This book is a great tool kit for the beginner and a good refresher course for the more experienced.
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