UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial: A detailed and practical walk-through showing how to apply UML to real world development projects [Paperback]

Patrick Graessle (Author), Henriette Baumann (Author), Philippe Baumann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2005

If you've read the UML documentation or a guide to the UML syntax, but don't feel you really know where to start with UML on a live project, then this unique book is what you need. Written as a practical case study, the book sets out to give you the intuitive feel for UML you need to confidently add it to your core development toolkit. The authors walk through a rich analysis and design scenario, explaining which parts of UML to use, and how to use them. The emphasis is on the systematic and practical application of UML to real business cases. The book was written for business analysts, technical architects and developers. It does not require detailed programming knowledge, nor is prior experience of UML mandatory. It shows how, with UML, simple models of business processes and specification models can be created and read with little effort.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The book is uniquely practical. A richly textured case study is used throughout the book. Although some aspects of the Airport Passenger Services business process are simplified for sake of clarity and efficiency, it provides a comprehensive practical grounding for theoretical UML knowledge. The case study itself was developed in partnership with employees of Zurich Airport.

About the Author

Patrick Gr¿ssle is the co-founder and board member of KnowGravity Inc. (http://www.knowgravity.com) in Z¿rich, a leading supplier of MDA and Business Rules know-how. Patrick studied Informatics and Economics at the University of Z¿rich. In 1986, he built his first model of an IT system using structured analysis and did not stop modeling since then. He has applied UML in many projects. He used and consulted structured and object-oriented methods for system specification. In the nineties, he helped develop the first localized UML trainings in Switzerland. The UML-based 'Model Driven Architecture' and the 'Business Rules Approach' absorb his main interest nowadays, but he is still doing UML training and consulting.

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (September 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811558
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811558
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,008,254 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You can not claim anymore that UML is hard to understand!, May 3, 2006

By 

Radu Cristian Fotescu (Romania (Europe)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial: A detailed and practical walk-through showing how to apply UML to real world development projects (Paperback)

First of all, why learning UML? Mainly because the Unified Modeling Language is maybe the best-known standardized graphical notation you can use to create an abstract model of a system. With complex systems, you can not rely on ad-hoc graphical representations.

Then, how to choose a good and practical book for learning UML 2.0? This is a tough task, as major publishers have lots of books on UML, some of them extremely complex and pricey.

Given that I was only able to understand very basic concepts of UML diagrams, I always wanted to truly learn UML, but had no time, nor the obligation to do it. That's a pity, as I often find myself in lack of a standardized way to express the relationships that govern a particular process.

A book has therefore to be chosen by its practical aspect, not the comprehensiveness. It's better to be able to learn "just enough UML" to get a different perspective and to get your job done, than to be discouraged by a thick bible you don't even dare to open!

My candidates included:
-- "UML 2 and the Unified Process : Practical Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (2nd Edition)" from Addison-Wesley, which has good references both as a practical book and as a reference book. I however find it unappropriate that it insisted on using commercial UML tools from Rational Rose, MagicDraw and Interactive Objects. I don't want them, I just want the UML course!
-- Many Amazon.com visitors decided to buy the "UML Bible" instead. No kidding, why should I opt for a "clear and accessible... err... 940-page book?!"
-- A much more tempting choice is Kendall Scott's "Fast Track UML 2.0". The author has great references, the book itself is supposed to only capture the essential information from the complexity of UML 2.0 (and it's cheap too!), but Amazon.com's visitors insist on the proofreading errors in the book, even if they seem to have been addressed by the author, at least in part. I stayed in doubt though... even if I have previously bought from Apress and their books are good.

I can't remember now exactly how, but the next thing that came in my browser was "UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial", from Packt Publishing -- I've written about them two weeks ago on my blog.

This book is a translation of the German original 3rd edition of "UML 2.0 projektorientiert", from Galileo Computing.

To clarify a situation with Galileo's book's page on Amazon.de: the criticism over some errors are referring to the first edition -- things are now corrected. Packt's translation follows the latest available German edition.

We could take a look on what Amazon.com's readers have to say about the book from Packt. The only review to date comes from a Top 500 reviewer, who notes:
-- "UML can be a rather daunting subject if you try and look at the entire thing at once. But if you can distill down the items that are used most often, it becomes much more manageable. That's the goal of Packt Publishing's book UML 2.0 In Action - A Project Based Tutorial."
-- "UML 2.0 In Action will have you understand much more (and much more quickly) than you might otherwise figure out..."

What I've got with my purchase? A book, what else. This is not the cheapest book ever seen for its 229 pages (the German edition has 288 pages because of a slightly different layout). The only drawback compared to the German book is that the English one is paperback instead of hardcover and lacks the color A2-sized poster with diagrams and models. But this is easy to explain due to the printing process (see below).

The free shipping took seven days sharp from Birmingham (UK) to Brasov (Romania), and the Royal Mail stamp was labeled GBP3.39 (about US$6).

The cover is attractive and optimistic (orange, lime green and black make a perfect combination). The printing is somewhat less-than-perfect, and an educated eye would say the pages are printed on a laser printer... which they actually are! The printing house is Lightning Source, the world leader in Printing On Demand -- and that makes it all clear. To be able to print and ship from 3 different locations, traditional printing may be costly. Contrary to the first guess, printing on demand a book like this one (248 physical pages plus the covers) should only cost something like $6 in quantities of 500. About 50% of the price you paid is to be split between operational costs of the publisher, marketing, royalties, and the profit.

What I liked with this book in the first place? I mostly loved that it doesn't claim that "UML is a diagramming language meant to describe and document object-oriented software systems."

As I personally believe that UML is not only for IT projects, but also for any business process, this book gives me full satisfaction by saying: ?UML can be used to model a variety of systems: software systems, business systems, or any other system.?

To prove it, the book purposely limits its scope to the most useful and used parts of the UML, without claiming the completeness. The examples are deliberately took from the real life and are not treating the development of a software application, as you might be expecting! They do however address the modeling of IT systems (Chapter 4) and system integration (Chapter 5).

If you're taking for simple a business system consisting in an airport, with passengers, passenger services, all the possible situations, interactions, and involved information, well... think again! The describing of the functioning and organization of the "UML Airport" is the pretext of the whole book and it's quite an inspired choice: you can not claim you couldn't understand something because of "insufficient programming experience" -- no programming experience is required!

Three models are actually described and analyzed in the book:
-- the model of the business system (passengers, employees, business processes);
-- the model of the IT system dealing with the passenger services business system;
-- the model of the system integration of all these into the environment, including the connections with the external world.

As the book is fortunately good enough to be understood by business analysts, not only by software analysts, the class is defined at page 133 (Chapter 4, the IT systems) as ?a relevant concept from the domain, a set of persons, objects, or ideas that are depicted in the IT system?.

At the business system level, the Class Diagrams introduced at page 87 only rely on definitions from pp. 82-83:
-- the class "Worker", a stereotype ?used to describe the roles of those people who execute business processes or who are involved in execution of business processes?;
-- the class "Business Object", indirectly defined as being ?handled (utilized, controlled, manipulated, produced, etc.) by workers?.

I will not tell you the whole story, as I already have in my mind's eyes plenty of airplanes and check-in employees :-), I will only note that the book uses a very American/International English language and spelling, rather than a British one (it even writes "etc." without the ending point, as in the Merriam-Webster: "etc").

A typical software-oriented scholastic UML course would probably introduce at least 9 of the 13 types of UML diagrams , focusing on the "mandatory" 6 ones (marked with (?)), in this order:
-- Use Case Diagrams (?)
-- Class Diagrams (?)
-- Sequence Diagrams (?)
-- Communication Diagrams (?) (formerly Collaboration Diagrams)
-- State Diagrams (?)
-- Activity Diagrams (?)
-- Component Diagrams
-- Deployment Diagrams
-- Object Diagrams

Since the book describes an easier to understand busines process, it introduces concepts in this sequence:
-- Use Case Diagrams (?)
-- Activity Diagrams (?)
-- Sequence Diagrams (?)
-- Package Diagrams
-- Class Diagrams (?)
-- Use Case Sequence Diagrams -- a special type of (mixed) Sequence Diagrams advocated by the book!
-- Statechart Diagrams (a.k.a. State Machine Diagrams)
-- Communication Diagrams (?)

Quite logical, if you read the book -- even a little too advanced, as many simple processes can be described avoiding package diagrams. And definitely originalin my eyes as I didn't knew about the "Use Case Sequence Diagrams!"

System Integration (Chapter 5) requires some more terminology. It's time to find out that the 'events' you were using, together with the associated 'reference data', are nothing else but 'messages'. Or even 'documents' if they're XML-fied. (The book will not get too technical, don't worry.)

Overall, a pleasant and instructive experience, still awaiting for my time to explore, analyze and understand all the diagrams and the concepts. As many people consider UML to be too bloated, too fine-grained in many aspects, this book shows how you can only use what you really need of UML 2.0.

A 4.7 stars book, if that level of granularity was possible.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice for learning the most used features via hands-on examples..., October 30, 2005

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial: A detailed and practical walk-through showing how to apply UML to real world development projects (Paperback)

UML can be a rather daunting subject if you try and look at the entire thing at once. But if you can distill down the items that are used most often, it becomes much more manageable. That's the goal of Packt Publishing's book UML 2.0 In Action - A Project Based Tutorial by Patrick Grassle, Henriette Baumann, and Philippe Baumann.

Contents: Introduction; Basic Principles and Background; Modeling Business Systems; Modeling IT Systems; Modeling for System Integration; Index

UML 2.0 In Action takes the position that UML is like an iceberg... The stuff you use most often is the smaller portion that shows above the surface. So rather than try and write a 1000 page comprehensive tome on the subject, they take the essential portions most often used by real-life developers and weave them into a case study example. The "UML Airport" is used to show UML techniques such as Use Case Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, Package Diagrams, and Statechart Diagrams. The writing style is more conversational than what I'm normally used to seeing in a book on UML. Also, there isn't as much emphasis on explaining every last nuance on how a diagram can be drawn to handle every last exception you'll come across.

I can see where this book would be a good introduction text to UML. I would probably follow it up with a more comprehensive title of some type, one that documents all the nuances. While this one will get you off to a good start, you could find yourself in a situation where UML as practiced at your organization may have a few more twists than this one covers. Still, UML 2.0 In Action will have you understanding much more (and much more quickly) than you might otherwise figure out...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good introduction to the power of modeling with UML, May 26, 2008

By 

Methods & Tools Editor "www.methodsandtools.com" (Vevey Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial: A detailed and practical walk-through showing how to apply UML to real world development projects (Paperback)

This book is a very good introduction to the power of modeling with UML. After an initial presentation of the basic principles of modeling and UML, the book presents the diagrams used to model both business and software views of systems. The final part is devoted to the models that can be used for system integration.

All the diagrams are presented through the same case study. This book does not claim to be a detailed presentation of UML. It achieves with its case study to reach a good balance between providing enough knowledge to be used in real life situations, without being lost in features that are rarely used. The nicest aspect of this book is that it is not only a technical manual on UML diagrams, but it provides also valuable information and tips on how to create and verify them, by providing questions that will help you to conduct your analysis.

This is a book that I will recommend as a reference for developers performing system analysis and design activities. It is also a good practical book for students that follow an UML course.