Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
The Unified Modeling Language User Guide Review by Bl0b
Totally lost in the myriad of details
Reading this book is like being in a dense jungle where animals make noises around you but you don't see them. When you think you saw one it just disappears. It fails, at least for me, to show the path.
The information is structured in such a way that I don't know for sure if I exhausted a subject or not. The book tends to explore the uml concepts in isolation with some concrete examples and it fails to integrate them fluidly in the context or contexts where they apply. You have to leap through chapters back and forth to put the things together. Let's take class diagrams. Chapters 8 and 9 are dedicated to class diagrams but if you browse these chapters you see blue side nodes: stereotypes are discussed in chapter 6 (page 111), aggregation is discussed in chapters 5 & 10 (page 111), generalization is discussed in Chapters 5 and 10 etc. When you go to chapter 5 there are other references that point to chapter 15 and of course back to 8. You get the idea. By the time I finished chapters 8 & 9 I had a soup in my head with all the concepts floating in all directions trying to escape.
The chapters are not even ordered in a more natural order that is the order you'd approach a real life problem to model. It begins with structural modeling. In reality to get there you need to explore some of the behavioral aspects first.
I would also have liked to see more coding examples similar with the examples from the GOF book. It is always nice to see how some of these diagrams would translate in source code.