The authors state in their preface, “Don’t read it all in one night,” and proceed to prove their point. This long and copiously illustrated text expounds a method that resembles old-fashioned flowcharting but is applied to object-oriented methodology.
Catalysis is based on the industry-standard Unified Modeling Language (UML). The authors claim that their approach provides
precisely defined interfaces independent of implementation,
high-integrity design,
case-driven methods to transform a business application into object-oriented code, and
techniques for understanding existing software and embodying it in new software.
The presentation is diagrammatic and should be suitable for the administrator who wishes to be familiar with current usage (such as the Booch approach). To make use of the material, however, a great deal of interpretation would have to be inserted by an expert programmer before any real code emerged.
The authors are at pains to define various reading schemes to suit analysts, object-oriented programming systems designers, managers, and testers. There are chapter summaries and notes, a glossary, a good bibliography, and a comprehensive index. I do not think that I would use the book as a course text, but I could recommend it to practitioners.
