The idea behind this book is to give non-IT project members (business users, management etc.), enough of an understanding of UML to improve project communication via documentation. This is a laudable aim, and would be useful. However, this book does not live up to this ambition.

I would have hoped that the authors would have concentrated their efforts on giving a digestible overview of XML - possibly illustrated with meaningful examples.

There was some effort at this - but at times it seemed to take second priority to the exhortations of reuse of component based design. Whilst I would not disagree with the sentiment, it was not clear how this was appropriate in this book.

I had other grumbles with this book. Some of the discussions suddenly dropped into quite a technical level (e.g. strategies for mapping object hierarchies to database tables). All jolly interesting, but not necessarily appropriate to the target audience.

There certainly were good aspects to this book. The 'traps' section of use cases was good.

Unfortunately, although this would have been appropriate in a teaching manual for UML it was possibly not useful for the management (who might want to know how to read a use case, not to write them).

In summary, although there are good bits this book, it is not focused to a particular audience and spends too much time evangelising over the 'paradigm' of component based delivery.

Not recommended.Database Topics