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Reviewer: Jeffrey B. Putnam

There is certainly good information in this book, and it is presented well. But somehow, every time I tried to read it, I felt that I had had enough after a few minutes, and then a while later I would be wishing for something more substantial. The book is a collection of 22 articles by the author from Object Magazine, the Journal of Object Oriented Programming, and ROAD. (A number of them are co-authored by either Conrad Block or Martin Fowler.) Each is about ten pages long and relatively self-contained. The articles cover a variety of topics in OOAD, ranging from “Business Rules”—a discussion of using rules to describe object relationships—to “Managing Object Complexity.” The articles are grouped into seven main areas: structural issues, including (among others) articles on “Modeling Objects,” “Structural Constraints,” and “Power Types”; dynamic issues, including “What Is Object State” and “Finite State Machine Modeling”; business rules, including “Business Rules” and “Using Rules with Diagrams”; object complexity, including “Managing Object Complexity”; object aggregation, including “Six Different Kinds of Aggregation” and “A User Level Model of Aggregation”; design templates, including “From Analysis to Design Using Templates”; and the process of objects, including “Method Engineering” and “Object Oriented Methodologies.” Many of the articles discuss aggregation and the uses of different kinds of aggregation in constructing objects and object systems. I found these the most interesting and informative of the articles, but rather than helping me solve any real problems, they left me with a better understanding of the complexity of aggregation as a modeling tool, deepening my view of the difficulties of accomplishing good object modeling and design for real implementations. The title mentions UML, but while UML is used (at least sketchily) as a modeling framework, it is not explored in any depth. The reader is evidently expected to already understand UML and its use. Overall, the book is well written. Each chapter has its own bibliography, as one might expect from a collection of published articles, but since these have been published in a single book, the references might have been more effective in one place. The index is sketchy. At one point, I searched the index for a reference to a topic I had thought important enough to generate one or more index entries, but discovered that it was not included in the index at all. This book should be useful to those very seriously interested in object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), authors of other books on OOAD, and compulsive collectors. General readers looking for information on how to use OOAD in practice will find it unsatisfying.