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Principles of the Business Rule Approach Review by Dan Albarran
Too Much Fluff!
I generally refrain from purchasing books that only have 2 or less reviews unless it is referred by a friend or colleague because I generally assume they were written by close friends of the author. This time I decided to take a gamble due to the dearth of reading material on this topic. While the book bring ups a lot of good concepts it is amazingly lacking in others.
Pros:
1) Chapter on rule speak was pretty good
2) The chapter on fact models is ok. The back of the book says "in depth look at fact models". This is not true. It was severely deficient. A fact model is so similar to a class diagram. You are better off reading books on class diagramming and applying those principles and knowledge to rules.
3) Discussion of rule classifications was very good
Cons
1) The book has 372 pages but if you remove the appendixes, glossary and index you are left with 284. The appendixes were useless and felt like filler. All terms in the glossary were defined elsewhere in the book
2) The author particular use of footnotes was distracting. This was by far my biggest pet peeve of the book. a) Many notes were used to advertise the author's company products and services. b) Many contradicted the passage. p 80, foot note 22 says starts off by saying "That is not entirely correct..." P126, footnote 4, " I mean rejectors here". If that is what you meant, why waste a footnote. Just say what you mean in the text. c) The average page had 2+ foot notes and I would say that 95% of the foot notes were not used to reference anything but to add to the thought noted on the page which meant that readers had to continuously read the passage then go to the bottom to read the note over and over again.
3) The analogies to the human body were fluff and added no real value. I would say that the book has about 100 pages of real content. Much of the book is repetitive.
4) There is a discussion on decision tables but not decision trees. I have no idea why considering how prominent decision trees are in rule projects.
5) I would have liked to see more material on modeling rules. The book is surprisingly weak here.