A while ago I received, from packt, a copy of “UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial” by Patrick Grassle, Philippe Baumann, Henriette Baumann. This book certainly lives up to it’s byline of being “a detailed and practical walk-through showing how to apply UML to real world development projects”.
UML is a standardized visual specification language for object modeling and is short for “Unified Modeling Language” that includes a graphical notation used to create an abstract model of a system, referred to as a UML model. There are many software tools available which can be used for code generation and reverse engineering, such as the new PEAR package PHP_UML which generates a UML representation of existing PHP source code.
This book assumes no prior knowledge of UML and this works very well. It is by no means comprehensive but that it’s what the authors set out to write – this book is focused on being a practical tutorial for learning the essentials of modelling business systems, IT systems and systems integration – no more, no less. It does this admirably and I’ll recommend this book as a reference and introduction for developers performing system analysis and design activities.