Book review: UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial
Z Jacek Laskowski - Wiki Projektanta Java EE
UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial by Henriette Baumann, Patrick Grassle, Philippe Baumann (Packt, September 2005)
Indispensable source of practical UML
It'd been a while since I received the book "UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial" for a review. The subject wasn't at all engaging and so I wasn't very tempted to give it a whirl for a long time. Even the publication date - September 2005 - hardly invited me to its reading but in the end I found it very informatory and concise to some degree.
The book's just slightly over 200 pages with many diagrams, figures and checklists so it doesn't take long to read it after all. Its authors seemed very competent and described each and every detail "to apply UML to real world development projects" (quoting the book's subtitle). The checklists and questionnaires were specially useful as they can be used as a kind of a cheat sheet for the steps to follow to reach a given architectural outcome. There were criteria to apply and procedures for drawing UML diagrams followed by their explanations.
Such "a simplified approach to UML" (page 29) paved the way for its use in my projects since the book presented UML as a practical language without more ado - it had barely enough to show the aim and proper use of the language. That's the book's most precious value.
The other value of the book were many suggestions, observations and examples of how the authors used UML in real projects. The book contained many such examples where the authors set out their explanation with "in our practical experience", "we recommend", "helpful techniques have proven", "we often encounter", "practice shows" and such. The authors used excerpts from the UML 2.0 specification to convey their point.
The authors however didn't manage to avoid using the same pattern to explain modeling business and IT systems and the book suffered from almost repeating itself. It was utterly boring and often depressing. I was glad it didn't last long.
If I had to point out a section that truly shows the way the authors explained UML, it'd be the one from "3.3.5 Activity Diagrams" (page 59):
"Activity diagrams allow you to think functionally. Purists of the object-oriented approach probably dislike this fact. We, on the other hand, regard this fact as a great advantage, since users of object-oriented methods, as well as users of functional thinking patterns, find a common and familiar display format, which is a significant aid for business-process modeling."
It shows the various approaches to explain UML with their own personal take.
The book was first published in German and only after a few years was it reprinted in English. The authors aimed at writing a one-stop UML book for "members of IT project teams" (page 28) that I think was mostly achieved. I benefited a lot from having read the book and it certainly deserved my reading.
