Customer Reviews

Understanding UML: The Developer's Guide (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming)

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

 

 

While this book goes further than most other OO design books I've read, it still falls well short of answering the elusive question - How the hell do I apply all this to my real life large scale applications? Most authors conveniently ignore the very existence of the GUI and focus on the easy part - the business classes. At least this books acknowledges the role of infrastructure classes and does give a few tips on when to introduce infrastructure classes in the analysis/design process. Fact is, in most business applications over 60% of the coding and maintenance effort is spent on the GUI and infrastructure (the How-To of an application). The authors too seems to agree that the nuts-and-bolt design takes up the most time in OO development process. In spite of this, less than 10% of the book is devoted to design. In fact, fleshing out the detailed design is left to the reader. The book does not even provide a complete class diagram for the simple example application.

Surprisingly, the authors suggest that developing the user interface could be done outside UML design! That means that the painstakingly developed models are useless when it comes to generating code! If I can't model all the classes in my application, round-trip engineering, as promised by many a UML tool vendors, becomes a pipe dream and the whole UML iterative development methodology falls flat on it's face. Very disappointing.

My rating is based on the comparison of the book's title to its content. I was expecting an advanced book on the UML for the seasoned developer based on the title.

What I got was a beginner's introduction to OO develelopment. In fact, the authors state on page 293 in the Afterword:

We've tried to keep this book simple. [...] If this book helps you get a feel for OO development and makes it possible for you to generate diagrams [...], we've done what we set out to do.

Don't be tricked me into purchasing the book by the misleading title. UML is discussed, but not in depth. If you're new to OO development, this book may be a good introduction. It also gives a fairly good introduction to the UML.

But a better book for just an introduction to UML is:

UML Distilled: applying the standard object modeling language by Martin Fowler with Kendall Scott

And for a more in-depth book, I liked:

The Unified Modeling Language User Guide by the three amigos

While I'm sure the authors knew exactly what they were talking about, they did a truly poor effort of communicating the subject to the audience. Case in point: they spend the first 5 or so chapters mostly talking about what they will cover later on in the book or how a different topic (like Java) pertains to UML - and they'll talk more about it later. Few diagrams or examples were available, and those present aren't explained terribly well.

I was VERY disappointed in this book. I was very surprised to see other reviews praising this work. I found it's presentation very superficial and confusing. If possible, I would have given it a lower rating.

Wow, this book is not the first to do this, but it surely lays claim to "title crime". It is an intro book at best and not a great one at that. The application is a joke.

I agree with the previous reviewer. A better UML intro is UML distilled. For more advanced and exploratory work check out the Larman UML book and the Coad UML color book.

Although I was able to get a reasonable understanding of UML notation and how/when to use certain UML diagram types, the book was quite a dissappointment overall.

The authors spend way too much time on analysis methods that (admittedly) have no representative UML diagrams. Although they state clearly that UML is purely notational and does not imply/condone any particular methodology, they proceed to introduce a "generic" methodology of their own, and spend most of the book explaining it and using it to develop a simple "application".

Without doubt the most dissappointing thing about this book (to me) is the joke of an application developed by the authors. For a book subtitled "The Developer's Guide, with a Web-based application in Java", I actually laughed out loud a few times at example source code.

Sorry, guys, this book could've and should've been much, much better.

I'm very pleased with this book. The authors take you step-by-step through the visual modeling process using UML and Java. I read the book cover to cover. It's almost like a good friend taking your hand and guiding you all the way.

I would highly recommend this book if you are new to UML or not clear on how the many diagrams fit together to elaborate an analysis and design effort.

Thanks, Paul Harmon and Mark Watson for writing such a great read.

Chapter 10 thru 15 present a sufficient introductory view of the subject in a sequentially well defined manner, supported by great diagrams. The appendix example is well tied in with the discussion from chapter 10 and up. However, I am astonished to see the author's reference to Connection as a class. Connection is an INTERFACE, not a class __I assume that, this is a mishap.

Well, for the material from chapter 10 an up, I give this effort 8/10.

This book is a MUST for everyone wishing to commence the journey in OO modeling. The author discusses all the concepts with a high level perspective with easy to understand illustrations and explanations. An excellent book for starters.

This book makes UML simple and easy to use. The driven example conducts you to understand quickly the features that UML offers to you. Moreover, it's unexpectedly complete, adding very interesting subjets such as BPR, CRC cards or Java. Just to begin to understand UML. Even if you are not interested in Java, but the best if you want to.