The Unified Modeling Language User Guide
 |
Author: Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson
List Price: $54.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201571684
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (30 September, 1998)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 16,098
Average Customer Rating: 3.42 out of 5
|
Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
More powerful than a barbiturate
The guys who essentially invented UML wrote this book-the infamous 'Three Amigos'. You would think that given that their book is about design they would have taken the time to make it visually appealing. Needless to say I should have judged this book by its cover. It sucked.To start with each chapter begins with an analogy on how building a house is like software design. When I started the book the analogy seemed appropriate, by chapter 31 I wanted to break someone's nose. Outside of the horrible cover design and redundant analogies the book is poorly organized. The book constantly refers to terms that it doesn't expound upon or for that matter define anywhere. For example, the authors refer over and over again to CRC Cards, but they're not defined anywhere in the book. What's worse, however, are the partially defined lists. For example the authors go to the trouble of informing you that there are four kinds of events in UML, but only bother to discuss three of them. Maddening! The chapters don't really follow a logical flow. The Three Amigos constantly skip backwards and forward throughout the book. In the side margins, almost as an afterthought they have included chapter references in blue type. If you follow the chapter references you're reading all over the place. Moreover, and perhaps most annoying of all is when they keep referring to concepts that they cover later in the book. I was paranoid that I day dreamed my way over the whole concept of the state machine until I discovered it nested away in chapter 21. Last but not least, the book is poorly written. Seriously, if you have to read this piece of crap you better brew a big pot of coffee. Technical literature can be a bit dry at times, but this is an exceptionally horrid piece of work. Death to the Three Amigos and a pox on Rational for hiring them! Don't buy this book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Not a tutorial
This book is *not* a tutorial. People wanting to learn and use UML quickly should look elsewhere (such as "UML - a beginner's guide" by Jason T. Roff).However, the book is a serious piece of work on the UML subject coming from the most authorized voices on the topic. The book is rather for people with good experience in OOP and some experience in UML.
Rating: 3 out of 5
A User's Guide, no more...no less
I didn't know much about UML when I started reading this book and feel that it's given me some good grounding. But I suspect that there are probably books on the subject that are specifically aimed at introducing it to beginners and do a more effective job of that.This is more of a reference book. It's well-cross referenced and I find it much more helpful for looking up individual terms, diagram types, etc. than when I read it front-to-back. What I was hoping to gain from the book is a better sense of when, where, and why you would be creating the different diagrams and how it all fits into a development life-cycle. Evidently, this kind of information is left to other "Three Amigos" books. I'm inclined to agree with other reviewers who feel that this book is "wordier" than it really needs to be. They repeatedly use an analogy to building a house that gets nearly as tiresome as it is obvious. But if you find UML to be useful, necessary, or just intersting, this would be a good book to have in your library.
Similar Products
· UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Third Edition
· Writing Effective Use Cases
· Design Patterns
· The Unified Software Development Process
· The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
| 
