Customer Reviews

Developing Applications with Java™ and UML

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a professional developer who is moving from procedural languages and methodologies to object technology, Java and UML. I have bought and read many books on Java and UML, some good, some bad. This book is the best explanation I have found so far. It is genuinely pragmatic, with a case study that can easily be understood. The book is nothing short of exceptional. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This book is tremendous on theory, but horrible on actual usage. I picked it up several times and was never able to get through it, and I don't believe you could ever get an entire team of developers to read, understand and implement the theories in this book.

Unless your sole job is UML, I don't know how one would ever find time to get through this book. Perhaps my view will change after I develop a better understanding of UML.

I am a professional developer trying to combine my Java knowledge with more recently acquired UML skills. When I first opened the book I was genuinely impressed with the clarity of thought and language. I have since read it from cover to cover and my respect for the author has only increased.
He takes a pragmatic view of the RUP focusing on 10 key artifacts (out of 109) and has turned my theoretical appreciation of UML into a practical development tool. I particularly liked his event frequency table and clean presentation of use cases. The book provides an easy to follow example containing enough detail to be real world without distracting from the key messages. The teaching style is excellent, reinforcing ideas and summarizing key points and I found the example code to be clear, helpful and focused.
In summary, I cannot recommend this book too highly for anyone intending to embark upon a Java development using UML. Read the outline. Buy the book. Enjoy learning.

Paul Read's book is one of the most applicable, thorough, and "practiceable" UML books to date (and I have read a lot of them). One of the concepts that was a real breakthrough for me was the event list/table. There always seemed to be a step missing in the transition from a client requirements document to use cases, and the notion of the event list was it. A number of projects I've worked on have suffered from the use cases being far to granular, resulting in a nearly unmanageable number of them. The event list serves as the perfect tool for eliminating this problem.
While the sample project is not unnecessarily complex, it provides the level of detail necessary to apply RUP and UML to just about any Java project. Furthermore, most UML books fail to move beyond the theoretical level and provide concrete examples. This is not the case with Java and UML. This book is written in a style that is easy to read and will have you familiar with the concepts and applying them to your own projects in a matter of days.

This is a one-in-a-million technology book that makes sense from multiple angles. Most UML books are written by researchers that tend to have a myopic view on a project's scope. My impression from reading the book is that Paul Reed, the author, knows the theory and is experienced at practicing this theory - a rare find.

This book fully encompasses a whole project view and succesfully involves/educates the reader.

Let me explain : It is challenging to develop a book that covers OOP, UML, Rational Unified Process(RUP), Java/J2EE, Application Servers/IDE etc. Also most publishers will not touch such a subject assuming it will narrow the potential readership.

Having heap all the flatery, I must add some caution - to fully make sense of the book the rader must be somewhat familiar with some of the concepts - i.e. OOP, Java. Otherwise it can be hard to grasp.

I would recommend this book to developers/managers that wish to enhance their requirements process in software development.

In this book you can expect to visualise the role of UML in the full cycle of a project. The development process followed is RUP. There are nice background information on how to enhance the productivity of the development team in the design stages. The project discussed is a typical J2EE set-up - JSP, Servlets, choice of Javabeans and EJB, choice of Tomcat or BEA WebLogic and a Microsoft SQL Server (or Oracle) as the back-end.

I hope this review helps - please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Thank you.

This is an excellent book for programmers new to Java, UML and Java architecture. This is not a complete book on UML, patterns, EJB or Java but that is not its intention. The author does an excellent job of taking the rational unified process and UML and breaking it down to the relevant artifacts and diagrams. It contains excellent examples and doesn't try to over simplify. I highly recommend this book to development teams that are beginning to embark on Java web applications from other programming languages.

My only warning is that if you are unfamiliar with basic Java patterns (session façade, controller), you may get a little lost. It helps to have a basic understanding of Java and OOP. The book does get into EJBs but not enough to start coding your own EJB application but you will get the big picture and that is the best way to view this book.

This book was required reading for a project that we are currently doing. I am managing a team with some developers new to Java but had extensive VB experience. They found that this book helped then "think in Java"

I supplemented my reading with other books like Mastering Enterprise Java Beans by Ed Roman and the Sun J2EE Core Patterns Book. There is a decent book called Advanced Case Modeling if you want to get a different view on use case designs.

I would like to add that the book uses a session façade controller for each use case. The book doesn't really stress the consequences of doing this. The definition of a use case is as quite broad. Some architects prefer fine-grained use cases to course-grained. This book has you using course-grained. This is important so that you don't end up with too many controllers which can translate to hundreds of session beans. Make sure that you develop your use cases in a course-grained manner to avoid this problem. In addition, the book's example uses value object creation at the entity bean level. This could be abstracted to a value bean assembler.

As a user interface developer/consultant I have experienced first hand the value of a risk based, iterative/incremental approach to software design. This book does an excellent job of presenting a rigorous backbone to this approach; the software development "Unified Process". This book also does an excellent job of integrating the essential object oriented design deliverables (UML diagrams) with this software development process. Finally, these techniques are anchored to reality through example; the design of a real world, J2EE based, application. This book ranks as one of the best technology references that I have read in 25 years of software development.

I bought this book at the weekend and haven't really put it down since. Its the best text i've read so far that details the benefits of using UML, coupled with a decent process, to design and develop Java based applications (or using any other object orientated language for that matter).

To this extent, I would have no hesitation recomending this book; the author demonstrates both a very strong understanding of UML, together with its origins, and a clear & concise writing style.

Shaun.

[Irish Java Users Group]

The book covers building an application from scratch - moving through the use cases, entity classes, sequence diagrams, etc. After the design it goes on to implementing the project in Java with 3 options
Servlets, JSP & JavaBeans
Servlets, JSP & EJB using CMP
Servlets, JSP & EJB using BMP

I found the book very clear and the Java examples provided were a good example of the MVC & DAO design patterns.

There was even an example of how to estimate projects using use cases and a project plan.

I would highly recommend this book for new Java Architects, Senior Developers and people managing Java projects. It gave me a practical introduction to RUP, UML and J2EE design and design patterns.

After our CIO read Mr. Reed's book, it became required reading for team members of a particular development project. One of our issues was that the team members had a range of experience in UML and Java spanning from novice to expert. We needed everyone to have the same foundation of understanding in order to move ahead with defining our project deliverables and coding standards. After everyone completed reading this book, we were able to reassemble and have productive discussions on what we needed to do going forward.

As a non-programmer and someone who is relatively new to UML, RUP and Java, I found Mr. Reed's book to be well written and concepts clearly explained. It was certainly an eye opener for not just me, but our entire team. In fact we have begun to refer to it as "The Book Of Reed"!