Customer Reviews

Migrating to Object Technology

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I used this book in an OOA&D class I took several years ago, and it taught me absolutely nothing. The ideas are not organized in any particular order, there are no examples or illustrations of what the author is trying to convey, and there is some absolutely worthless software distributed with the book that is so useless you'll believe you're doing something wrong until you realize it is of such limited usefulness that it is basically an Excel spreadsheet with a poorly designed user interface.

This book was so useless to me that when the class was over, rather than donate it to a library or a friend, or just keep it for further reference, I instead decided to throw it in the garbage. This was because:
(a) I wouldn't want to burden the library or another human being with such a useless book.
(b) If I kept it, it would be taking up valuable space on my bookshelf.
Instead, allow me to recommend "Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design" just recently published by O'Reilly and Associates. One reason I delayed writing this review was that I wanted to have something to guide people toward - such as the O'Reilly book - versus just ranting about how bad this book is.

P.S - On further review, I must apologize to the makers of Excel. Their spreadsheets are much more useful and versatile than the software included in this book.

I acquired the book through a random read of available titles at Amazon.com and have been very glad of it. The case tool accompanying the book, while not capable of providing reports, provides an excellent structure for acquiring the business structure information in an Object Oriented approach. I've not found any other tool to match it. Even Rational Rose reccomends MS Word to capture this information, which is patently ridiculous.

The text is highly informative, providing an extensive background for the growth to Object Technology from the procedural methods and relational databases of the past. He provides a variety of benefits to help sell management on the need to migrate to Object development.

This work has become my bible of OOT because it covers the area so well. But there is much in the work, and requires several reads and study to appreciate its contents. Though the work was published in 1995 (I'm writing in 1998), I find it more valuable now than when originally published.