A-W Book Info

This article is a review of the book "UML Distilled: Applying the Standard Object Modeling Language" by Martin Fowler with Kendall Scott, published by Addison-Wesley, 1997. The primary goal of this book is to provide a quick tour of the UML for those who would like to understand the background, main concepts, and notations that it supports. In this regard the book is explicitly a stop-gap measure before the release later in 1997 of three books from the "three amigos" at Rational: a UML users guide, a UML reference guide, and a description of a UML-based method called the Objectory Approach.

In addressing this goal the book is valuable as a very readable, high-level description of the UML accessible to anyone with a basic familiarity with pre-UML object-oriented analysis. There are chapters on each of the diagrams supported in the UML, and a short example of how a project refines from diagrams to code.

However, this book offers much more than a simple introduction to UML. In particular, it provides a number of insights in to object-oriented analysis based on the authors' extensive experience with object-based techniques. It does this in a worldy, no-nonsense style which I find refreshing and informative. In contrast to many such books by object analyist, the authors of this book are quite ready to point out the weaknesses of various notations, to promote informal note-taking in some situations, and even to suggest that complete object models are unnecessary for many projects during design and implementation.

I would recommend this book to two kinds of reader. First, if you want to make sure you understand what the UML is about, this book provides some light bed-time reading to get you started. Second, if you want to hear from an experienced practitioner of object-oriented analysis on how some of the main object-based techniques are used in real projects, then this book will provide valuable suggestions and heuristics that may help your next project.

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