Review by Billy Barron, Delphi Consultants

"UML Explained" by Kendall Scott (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-72182-1) caught me off guard. My initial reaction was "Why is the co-author of UML Distilled writing a book that is going to compete against UML Distilled?"

After looking through the book, I still think it competes against UML Distilled. The major difference between these two books is that UML Distilled follows Martin Fowler's way of using UML, which happens to be about the same as my personal beliefs. UML Explained takes more of a Rational Unified Process way of looking at UML.

UML Explained is well-written, easy to understand and a quick read. If you are trying to learn UML, you can easily do it from this book.

My recommendation is going to be odd. I recommend this book, but I would recommend UML Distilled even higher. The exception I'll make to that though is that if you are in a big process environment, then you'll be better off with UML Explained.