Rating: 
Summary: The best to start with UML and Java.
Review: This book makes UML simple and easy to use. The driven example conducts you to understand quickly the features that UML offers to you. Moreover, it's unexpectedly complete, adding very interesting subjets such as BPR, CRC cards or Java. Just to begin to understand UML. Even if you are not interested in Java, but the best if you want to.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Entry Level Book
Review: This book should be titled: "How to Think about Developing a Software Application" or "The Process Major Consultant and Software Design Firms use to Build Software Applications."I agree the book was a bit superficial on teaching you everything you need to know about UML. And the book could have benefited from more UML diagrams, but I learned so much more about other related topics which is what makes this book so great. The authors talk about the whole software development process - not just UML. This is the best entry level book I have read that gives a complete picture to the mystery of creating an Object Oriented software project. There's a lot more they could have said on software development and UML, but for a relatively easy to read book of 300 pages, I learned a tremendous amount of base knowledge that I'm sure a lot of traditional programmers may take for granted - such folks may have hoped for more UML info. Oh yes, I also got a good introduction to UML too.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly Written
Review: While I'm sure the authors knew exactly what they were talking about, they did a truly poor effort of communicating the subject to the audience. Case in point: they spend the first 5 or so chapters mostly talking about what they will cover later on in the book or how a different topic (like Java) pertains to UML - and they'll talk more about it later. Few diagrams or examples were available, and those present aren't explained terribly well.
Rating:
Summary: Yet another superficial design book
Review: While this book goes further than most other OO design books I've read, it still falls well short of answering the elusive question - How the hell do I apply all this to my real life large scale applications? Most authors conveniently ignore the very existence of the GUI and focus on the easy part - the business classes. At least this books acknowledges the role of infrastructure classes and does give a few tips on when to introduce infrastructure classes in the analysis/design process. Fact is, in most business applications over 60% of the coding and maintenance effort is spent on the GUI and infrastructure (the How-To of an application). The authors too seems to agree that the nuts-and-bolt design takes up the most time in OO development process. In spite of this, less than 10% of the book is devoted to design. In fact, fleshing out the detailed design is left to the reader. The book does not even provide a complete class diagram for the simple example application. Surprisingly, the authors suggest that developing the user interface could be done outside UML design! That means that the painstakingly developed models are useless when it comes to generating code! If I can't model all the classes in my application, round-trip engineering, as promised by many a UML tool vendors, becomes a pipe dream and the whole UML iterative development methodology falls flat on it's face. Very disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Yet another superficial design book
Review: While this book goes further than most other OO design books I've read, it still falls well short of answering the elusive question - How the hell do I apply all this to my real life large scale applications? Most authors conveniently ignore the very existence of the GUI and focus on the easy part - the business classes. At least this books acknowledges the role of infrastructure classes and does give a few tips on when to introduce infrastructure classes in the analysis/design process. Fact is, in most business applications over 60% of the coding and maintenance effort is spent on the GUI and infrastructure (the How-To of an application). The authors too seems to agree that the nuts-and-bolt design takes up the most time in OO development process. In spite of this, less than 10% of the book is devoted to design. In fact, fleshing out the detailed design is left to the reader. The book does not even provide a complete class diagram for the simple example application. Surprisingly, the authors suggest that developing the user interface could be done outside UML design! That means that the painstakingly developed models are useless when it comes to generating code! If I can't model all the classes in my application, round-trip engineering, as promised by many a UML tool vendors, becomes a pipe dream and the whole UML iterative development methodology falls flat on it's face. Very disappointing.
Rating: 
Summary: A beginning OO book - if that
Review: Wow, this book is not the first to do this, but it surely lays claim to "title crime". It is an intro book at best and not a great one at that. The application is a joke. I agree with the previous reviewer. A better UML intro is UML distilled. For more advanced and exploratory work check out the Larman UML book and the Coad UML color book.
| 
