Learning UML 2.0 Book

This book does a good job of introducing the reader to the object-oriented design structures of Unified Modeling Language. UML is not a programming language like C++ or MatLab, but rather, is a system for specifying computer programming projects. The UML features help you visualize and organize your project, so that you know what elements depend on what other elements, what actions take place first, second, and third in a sequence, and so forth. Coming from a programmer whose typical development method is to just "sit down and start coding," I've found UML very helpful for planning out my newest, very large project. This book explains all the different types of UML diagrams and briefly shows how to use them with simple examples.

There are lots of things this book won't do, and many cases you may have that will not be covered by this book. But it does help one learn the internal logic of UML, and it can help you decide which features or which diagram types you will need to look into more carefully, and which you can ignore for your project. The writing is generally clear and straightforward, and it is aimed at people who have some basic programming knowledge and some basic OO knowledge, but are not necessarily experts. All the code examples are Java, and I don't know Java at all (I use MatLab) but I did not find it hard to follow them. If you understand basic code you should be able to get the basic gist of what they are showing.

All in all, I would recommend this book to people who have a little bit of OO knowledge, and have perhaps heard of UML or started playing around with it in Visio, but want to really find out how all the parts of UML work. It's a good basic overview, and it introduces the subject fairly well. If you want to use UML a lot, you will probably need more than just this as a reference, however.