Customer Reviews

Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET

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

 

 

In the best... excuse me---worst tradition of WROX this book is yet another example of incoherent fragments and inconsistent writing. The reason I broke my rule and bought a WROX book is because there's hardly any (if any at all) decent documentation on Visio and it's *real-world* applications by and for developers. No, this book is not a complete waste of money, but it could be a thousand times better. Read on.

The funnies thing about this book is that right from the outset one of the authors promises that the book would cover *one* and only one real-world solution as opposed to other books who feed you different examples all the time. I read this book from cover to cover and yet... every chapter laid out a different example! ? Note to authors: can you guys at least talk to each other? Let along sync up content.

As far as editing goes... Was there editing done at all? You'll see a number of annoying typos and strange grammatical errors. I also found errors in a few diagrams which is worse than typos.

Chapter 1 starts off with a brief introduction and overview of UML and its basic concepts. It's neither comprehensive or clear enough for beginners, nor is it useful for those who are not new to UML.

Chapter 2 is a nice "tour of Visio" even though they messed up a couple of diagrams so don't count on their accuracy. Very much for beginners.

Chapter 3, "Diagramming Business Objects" is worth the money you paid for this book.

Chapter 6, "Documenting the Project" is totally out of place. It goes back to the basic UML diagram, and whoever wrote this chapter, drew the diagrams in a pretty unorthodox way. A bizarre chapter to say the least.

Chapter 8 is another reason you might want to own a copy of this book. It presents a short yet informative introduction to ORM, creating a database from a model and reverse engineering an existing one.

To sum it up, two stars for the effort and *some* useful content. To those who wrote Chapters 3 and 8 thank you. Other than that---a very sloppy job by WROX yet once again. Not worth the money at all. Get it from bookpook.com for much less or download for free from Usenet.

I don't know about you, but as a developer I've always wanted a book that covered the Visio modeling tool in a way that would help me be more productive in my work. With .NET and the release of the Visio for Enterprise Architects edition this desire for a comprehensive book covering Visio's use and *fit* within the .NET Enterprise Development suite has never been greater. I think Wrox has hit the nail on the head with the book offering, and believe that it will greatly help any developers looking to get an edge in developing with Visio & .NET. I know that it's been of great use to me in my development projects!

The book starts out ok, and at first you are told that the examples in this book will all be related to the same business so that the reader can understand the progression. The author also boasts that this book unlike most others will use references to the same business model for the entire book. Yeah Right!! Then the next chapter, most likely written by a different author starts using a completely different business model for his examples. Every other chapter continues to change the business model in order to present the subject matter. Not only is this very confusing, but sometimes the authors refer to parts of the book that don't even exist. Its like parts of the book were accidentally left out. Arrrrr!!! Then to top it all off there are tons of spelling and grammatical errors that could have been caught by simple proofreading. The solution to this problem, and I hope someone at Wrox is reading, is to not have more then one author write the book. Wrox does this all the time with their books. That's why most of their books suck! I should have learned my lesson the last time I read a Wrox book, but the only reason I bought this one is because there is nothing else available on the subject matter. And can you believe that they have a cover price of $59.99 for this garbage. I am never buying another Wrox book again.

I was in a rush - I needed to learn UML as quickly as possible, so I picked up the O'Reilly book "UML in a Nutshell". It's a good book, but a difficult book for ME at least, because I'm a coder and these concepts were foreign to me.

Next, I picked up THIS BOOK, and I learned more about UML in the first chapter than in any other effort I have made.

Great book !!!

I join the opinion of previous reviewers. This book cooks! I did read all the O'Reilly and Addison Wesley publications, but then what it come down to is just your daily needs. This book goes far from a quick tutorial, and gets you directly into your VS.NET way of thinking.
Read in 2 days, started working on an enterprise app the day after.
You need to know a little bit about software design and have some exposure to .NET. Then you buy this book.

There has been a real need for a text that explains how to use Visio for documenting software requirements. Likewise, there has been a real need for a text that shows how to tie the different UML diagrams together as part of a coherent and comprehensive process. This text promises to do both, and to some extent it succeeds, but it is far too fractured to live up to its initial promise.

I would still recommend the text for anyone seeking an introduction to UML in Visio. The examples are very simple, however, and the discussion of UML is incomplete, so I would recommend using a UML text as an accompaniment to this one as you work through it.

...maybe not the fault of the book, but Visual Studio support for UML isn't that great. In practical use, it is very frustrating and limited. Break out of Visual Studio and get Sparx Enterprise Architect for UML work.

I do not think that the title of this book is appropriate. The book is about UML but i question the professional bit in the title. The writing is okay but you can tell that different authors worked on the book. Had the book been a little more coherent I would have opted for 4 stars.

If you're a VS.NET Enterprise developer and are faced with a complex development project that you're struggling to get your head around this is the answer!

Having read other UML books I found them to be overly accademic but armed with book I can go from my diagrams straight into an automaticialy generated application shell.

Fantastic!

Ms Saeko Sekikawa

It is a total mystery to me why this book was written in the first place. From UML standpoint it covers only very basic scenarios. From software perspective it does not cover topics like "..how the hell do I specify .Net attributes and do not lose them in reverse engineering..." or "...why C# documentation is totally incompatible with what Visio produces...". The only thing this book teaches is how to do basic operations, which you probably can figure out on your own after 2 days of pocking around. DO NOT waist you money (I would use 0 star option if it was available)