This paperbound book defines “action diagrams,” promotes their use, demonstrates how their use could be extended to concurrent systems and databases, describes how different programming languages implement structured procedures that are expressed in action diagrams, and describes CASE tools that support action diagrams. Action diagrams are a Warnier-Orr form of using brackets to depict the structure of procedures. (The authors never mention the Warnier-Orr methodology, which left me wondering if I had missed something.)

The book contains many lists and some exercises at the end of each chapter. The exercises are of questionable value, since the book does not contain enough detail for instructional use at a university. The chapter on languages was a good idea, but it has shortcomings. For instance, the C example fails to note the role of the “continue” statement at a critical point, and the discussion of COBOL totally misses COBOL85 (this edition has a 1989 copyright). The discussion of fourth generation languages (4GLs) is better, but I wondered if I could have gotten the same discussion more directly from Martin’s 4GL book.

In summary, this book may have value as a reference on action diagrams, but I would rather have seen it published as a technical article or a chapter in a book on CASE tools. My judgment could be wrong--this is a second edition. Note that the authors have published a separate book on Diagramming techniques for analysts and programmers [1].