The author says in his preface that “the purpose of this text is to bring together the tools and methods used successfully by analysts in modelling the physical, logical, and data aspects of a system.” By and large, his book succeeds.

The book presents context diagrams, dataflow diagrams, data dictionaries, mini-specifications, pseudocode and structured English, action diagrams, decision tables, decision trees, state-transition diagrams, state-transition tables, time dependency charts, input/output processing charts, essential dataflow diagrams, normalization and object analysis, entity-relationship (E-R) diagrams, event diagrams, and event tables. Thus the coverage is comprehensive but clearly not exhaustive. For example, it does not refer to the work of Jean-Dominique Warnier, Ken Orr, or Michael Jackson.

The exposition is clear and logical and is backed by an excellent typographic presentation. The book is not entirely free from errors but they are acceptably rare and their effect is trivial. This book feels nice in the hand and is easy on the eye.

I believe that most systems analysts will want to own a copy of this work. It is an excellent book upon which to base a course. The author is to be congratulated.