Review by Billy Barron, Delphi Consultants

"The Art of Objects: Object-Oriented Design and Architecture" by Yun-Tung Lau, Ph.D. (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-71161-3) "offers an extensive overview of the long-standing practices of object technology, along with leading-edge developments in the field." I couldn't have said it better myself.

The book covers a real mix of topics. It covers some UML, object design, design patterns, CORBA, XML, Object Databases, OR mapping, and OO architecture. At the same time, it crams all of this into about 258 pages excluding the summaries and the exercise answers.

Therefore, none of the topics are explained in detail. In fact, while I was reading this, I kept thinking I haven't seen a book like this since college. What I mean by that, is that the material is given a pretty formal analysis with quite a bit of notation.

I will point out that the writing in this book is far above par for the books of this structure I've read in the past. Also, the author's coverage of the material is concise and accurate.

I've written papers like this in my college days. Looking back the problem was that my audience was always the professor and the paper was not that useful to the community at large. I want to look at the audience for this book. The book claims the following audiences: textbook for university training, textbook for industrial training, reference book for courses on object-oriented programming languages, and finally a reference for mid to advanced-level software professionals and graduate students. As far as the textbook angle, I think that Timothy Budd's OO book is far superior. The only advantage of this book is that it covers more current technology. Maybe a combination of the two in the same course would be useful. As far as a reference goes, it might be useful if you have no other OO reference books. Most OO designers I know already own an OO book, a UML book, Design Patterns, and books on the technologies that the author mentions.

In summary, while this is not a bad book, I have doubts about the structure of the book and whether or not it has a target audience. My conclusion is that this book might be useful for two groups of people. The first is someone who wants to get a feel about the technical side of the OO world without too much depth. The other is someone who doesn't have a set of reference books already and can only afford one. In either case, I would recommend going to the book store and taking a look at the book before purchase to make sure it is going to meet your needs.