Rating: 
Summary: How to use Rational Rose with UML for beginners
Review: It's a well-structured book. It gives you guidelines for using Rational Rose 4.0 through analysis, design, and code generation. Moreover, Author allows you to practice with a small project. Unfortunately, I found some chapters too superficial, above all Use Cases'chapter. I expected to find deeper explanations about visual modeling. It's not a book for mastering visual modeling with Rational Rose and UML.
Rating:
Summary: Good introductory text for persons learning to visual model.
Review: The book provides the uninitiated with a good introduction to the basic steps taken to build visual models. As the author points out in the preface, it is not a book for details on UML (I look forward to seeing the three books by the "three amigos"), nor is it a book on s/w architecture or design. What I liked was the simple way in which the basic issues were presented and the ability to use the instructions to create a model in Rose. The book would have gotten a 10 if the author had included pointers for the reader to go to for additional information.
Rating: 
Summary: If you are looking for good tutorial on Rational Rose?
Review: This a very good tutorial on Rational Rose 98, UML notation understanding is not necessary as it is intorduced as you go along, but understanding the Objectory Process is necessary because it is poorely introduced in this book. There is one problem with this book, the books claims that a course registration system for a university is employed to illustrate the analysis and design of an application, however in reality this example is totally marginalize as if inserted by force after the book was finished, this is why you need to understand to Objectory Process.
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Summary: I teach the UML and will be using it in my into class.
Review: This book has just enough detail to illustrate the process, without confusing the reader. It also has a good explaination of why and when the various artifacts are useful.
Rating: 
Summary: Good start; confusing inconsistencies; inadequate continuity
Review: This book is a concise, tantalizingly understandable introduction to UML with Rose. But it falls short of its promise. I suspect it could've been made much better - through careful organization & better editing - without adding a great deal more material. After reading the Jan 98 version, I came to Amazon.com hoping to find a later, improved edition - in vain. The book illustrates basic aspects of Rose usage but frequently fails to tie these illustrations to the underlying "University Course Registration" system example in a consistent manner. It's not always easy to tell whether or how a Rose usage illustration relates to the system being developed. The presentation flow suffers as a result. For example, pg. 53 shows how to create a new package and relocate classes between packages. The figures show Browser views with a class under the Logical View called StudentInformation and a package called PeopleInfo. But 2 pages later, having returned to system development in the same Browser view, the StudentInformation class has disappeared and the name of the PeopleInfo package has changed to People. There are several places where new, important concepts are quickly introduced and glossed over. For example, Scenarios are an important idea related to Use Cases and interaction diagrams, but on pg. 53 the term "scenario" is introduced without definition in a manner that appears to equate scenarios with sub-flows of use cases; the transition in terminology occurs without explanation. In spite of shortcomings like these I still recommend this book as a valuable "primer" for newcomers to OO and UML / Rose.
Rating:
Summary: Good start; confusing inconsistencies; inadequate continuity
Review: This book is a concise, tantalizingly understandable introduction to UML with Rose. But it falls short of its promise. I suspect it could've been made much better - through careful organization & better editing - without adding a great deal more material. After reading the Jan 98 version, I came to Amazon.com hoping to find a later, improved edition - in vain. The book illustrates basic aspects of Rose usage but frequently fails to tie these illustrations to the underlying "University Course Registration" system example in a consistent manner. It's not always easy to tell whether or how a Rose usage illustration relates to the system being developed. The presentation flow suffers as a result. For example, pg. 53 shows how to create a new package and relocate classes between packages. The figures show Browser views with a class under the Logical View called StudentInformation and a package called PeopleInfo. But 2 pages later, having returned to system development in the same Browser view, the StudentInformation class has disappeared and the name of the PeopleInfo package has changed to People. There are several places where new, important concepts are quickly introduced and glossed over. For example, Scenarios are an important idea related to Use Cases and interaction diagrams, but on pg. 53 the term "scenario" is introduced without definition in a manner that appears to equate scenarios with sub-flows of use cases; the transition in terminology occurs without explanation. In spite of shortcomings like these I still recommend this book as a valuable "primer" for newcomers to OO and UML / Rose.
Rating:
Summary: Would be a good book, if it came free with Rose...
Review: This book is a much more readable than the on-line documentation. It is a good introduction to Rose and UML for people who have never used either, but doesn't give you a solid enough grounding in either to be truly effective. The tutorial that comes with Rose is more complete, but doesn't guide you through the building of an application the way this book does. This gives you some guidance, telling you how to start with Use Cases, move on to sequence diagrams, and finally object relationships. Following the Flow of Events template is probably the most useful thing in this book; that isn't good, considering the Flow of Events template is nothing more than a Word document. This book can get you past that "Ok, I've installed Rose, now what do I do?" point. Unfortunately, it then leaves you saying "But how do I do THIS?" a lot. The book would be dramatically improved if it contained a COMPLETE example. Unfortunately, Ms. Quatrani gives you a bunch of Use Cases, then uses a different one in each part of the book. She doesn't follow a single thread, showing how to get from Use Case to code generation; instead, each part of the process uses a different scenario. There is no use case that has all diagrams (Use Case, Sequence, Collaboration, Class, State), so you can't easily see how one flows into the next. Also unfortunately, she seems to choose the simplest example in every case, leaving you wondering how to do a more complex one. The book desperately needs a complete model for the example program included with it, or at least a downloadable copy of the model on Rational's web site. In the book, she does gives you one (and only one) example of everything, but expects you to figure out how to generalize the example. And the sections on the Code Generation functions and Round-Trip Engineering are very perfunctory, seeming like an afterthought. The book doesn't even come close to using the UML 1.1 specification, but neither does Rose, so that's no surprise. You'd expect the company developing UML would make a tool that supports it, but even Rose '98 fails there. If you're looking at the UML 1.1 spec, it'll confuse you. This book is geared toward Rose 4.0. It won't help at all with Object-Relational mapping and the other features introduced in Rose '98.
Rating:
Summary: Light on Content
Review: This book is very light on content. Most of the rose documentation is light, with no real insight on how to use the tool to it's fullest.
Rating: 
Summary: Rose's on-line help files are more useful than this book.
Review: This book just does not live up to its title. There is no serious discussion on any topic covered in it. Adding word 'Introduction' to the title would increase its mark to 4.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent guide to the intricacies of Rational Rose
Review: This book was an excellent resource. As a guide to learning Rational Rose, it was great value. I think that some of the reviewers might have misunderstood the intention of the book. It is not meant to be a UML tutorial - a basic knowledge of UML is assumed for readers of this text. The book is all about applying UML using Rational Rose, and as a book with this aim it succeeds admirably. It is far more succinct than the Rational documentation, and it also includes practical ongoing exercises to work through as you read. I've been using Rational Rose for about a year, but this book was great for being able to learn all the esoteric aspects of the program & how the UML is used within it.
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