After a decade of practical experience, the unified modeling language (UML) has reached its first major revision, UML 2.0. This book is the second edition of the original user guide [1] written by the “tres amigos,” Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and Jim Rumbaugh, who are the creators of UML, “the standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting all the artifacts of a software system.”

The book is not intended to be a reference for the language, but provides a reference to the use of specific UML features, distinguishing between the basic and the advanced, thereby substantiating the Pareto principle: you can model 80 percent of most problems by using 20 percent of UML. The user guide is addressed to software development teams, although it is suited to anyone dealing with software production, deployment, and maintenance. A basic knowledge of object-oriented concepts is definitely needed.

After a brief introduction to the reasons for modeling, and an overview of the language, Part 1 ends with the classic “Hello, World!” example. The next parts, 2 to 6, cover the main features, grouped by area of modeling. Basic structural modeling introduces the main usage of the language, with classes, relationships, common mechanisms, diagrams, and class diagrams. The next part covers the advanced structural features, adding details to classes and relationships, and introducing interfaces, types, and roles, as well as packages, instances, object diagrams, and components.

The next two parts cover basic and advanced behavioral modeling: interactions and their diagrams, use cases and their diagrams, and activity diagrams are the basic modeling concepts, while events and signals, state machines, processes, threads, time and space diagrams, and state diagrams are the advanced ones. In addition, the architectural aspects of the language are detailed: artifacts, deployment, collaborations, pattern and frameworks, systems, and models.

A final short chapter concludes the discussion, with suggestions on how to start applying UML. Two appendices follow: one summarizes the elements of UML notation, while the other is an introduction to the rational unified process. A useful glossary and index complete the book.

Following Addison Wesley’s “Object Technology Series” standard, the book is typographically clean, with simple cross-references between features in the left margin, and blue annotations on figures detailing the usage of terms. Each chapter opens with a brief overview of the feature covered, introduces the terms and concepts, illustrates common modeling techniques, and closes with hints and tips. The authors try to concretize each feature with real-world examples; given the experience of the writers, it would have been nice to have a single case study dissected throughout the book.

Unfortunately, the book does not highlight the additions to, and modifications of, this revision of UML; an overview of how UML 2.0 improved some modeling techniques would have been appropriate for people with experience in UML, and for owners of the first edition of the book. Apart from these minor drawbacks, I highly recommend this book to anyone involved in software development.