Review by Billy Barron

"The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual" by Booch, Jacboson, and Rumbaugh (Addison-Wesley; ISBNs 0-201-30998-X) took me by surprise. I was expecting a dry through explanation of notation. This book is not that at all. This was by design though.

The book attempts to cover all of the important topics. To get there, it takes an unusual approach. There are a few introduction chapters as might be expected. Part 2 of the book has one chapter per view. In each chapter, the view is covered both notation-wise and discussion-wise.

Part 3 was the biggest surprise for me. It is an "encyclopedia of terms." This section is worthwhile even if you are an OO person who doesn't care about diagramming with UML. It gives a definition for each term and frequently the Semantics, Notation and Discussion associated with it.

However, this book is a rough read. I opened the book randomly and found the following as an example: "Branch: An element in a state machine in which a single trigger leads to more than one possible outcome, each with its own guard condition." After reading it a second time carefully along with looking up what a "guard condition" was, I understood. The point though is that the definitions are rigorous, but hard to digest on a quick read.

The book is worth buying for your reference library for the encyclopedia section alone. I will personally be using it when I have a situation to model and know the term but not the UML syntax. The encyclopedia will lead me to the syntax.