Systems Analysis and Design : An Object-Oriented Approach with UML

Rating:
Summary: Two Thumbs Up
Review: Alan Dennis and Barbara Wixom make a difficult subject come alive with easy to understand language and real life case studies

Rating:
Summary: Useful for Students and Practitioners
Review: Having taught system analysis and design in the past, and having taken courses on it, this is one of the better books out there. The difficulty faced by the authors is that there is no "one true" methodology for analyzing and designing systems.

This book does a good job of overviewing the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and brings real-world examples to the table. An on-going example does a good job of illustrating how all of the diagrams work in a real-world scenario. This is one of the few books to give a strong overview of the entire process, and does not get mired in anecdotal monologues.

Odds are, you will need to read more than one book to understand this subject, and hands on will be needed to be able to implement the techniques used.

I have extensive programming experience, but many of my classmates had none at all, and yet we all found the book informative and interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Minimally Acceptable as a College Textbook
Review: The authors take on a pretty broad topic, and give it just cursory overview. Their 16 chapters are divided into the broad areas of Planning, Analysis, Design, and Implementation. However, the individual chapters within the text are not well organized within those areas. For example, what are UML Class diagrams and structural modeling doing in the Analysis phase, when they more clearly belong in design? It seems like UML has been pasted into a systems book just so that a current buzzword can end up in the title. When was the last time any of you used CRC cards? Yet they end up in the same chapter with UML diagrams.

Chapter 10, System Architecture Design, is rather disappointing. Although the book mentions terrorist attacks, indicating its 2002 heritage, there is barely a mention of web-based deployment or eCommerce paradigms in this section.

Many of the anecdotes collected as side bars in the book are entertaining, but they don't always make a point relevant to the discussion at hand.

If this is your textbook for a class, pay close attention to the prof. You will get much better insights into System Analysis and Design from a real person with real-world experience, than this cobbled-together book.