Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET

Rating:
Summary: UML yes, but
Review: I do not think that the title of this book is appropriate. The book is about UML but i question the professional bit in the title. The writing is okay but you can tell that different authors worked on the book. Had the book been a little more coherent I would have opted for 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the time...
Review: I don't know about you, but as a developer I've always wanted a book that covered the Visio modeling tool in a way that would help me be more productive in my work. With .NET and the release of the Visio for Enterprise Architects edition this desire for a comprehensive book covering Visio's use and *fit* within the .NET Enterprise Development suite has never been greater. I think Wrox has hit the nail on the head with the book offering, and believe that it will greatly help any developers looking to get an edge in developing with Visio & .NET. I know that it's been of great use to me in my development projects!

Rating:
Summary: Better Than Most
Review: I join the opinion of previous reviewers. This book cooks! I did read all the O'Reilly and Addison Wesley publications, but then what it come down to is just your daily needs. This book goes far from a quick tutorial, and gets you directly into your VS.NET way of thinking.
Read in 2 days, started working on an enterprise app the day after.
You need to know a little bit about software design and have some exposure to .NET. Then you buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Programmers Guide
Review: If you're a VS.NET Enterprise developer and are faced with a complex development project that you're struggling to get your head around this is the answer!

Having read other UML books I found them to be overly accademic but armed with book I can go from my diagrams straight into an automaticialy generated application shell.

Fantastic!

Ms Saeko Sekikawa

Rating:
Summary: You're in for much confusion
Review: In the best... excuse me---worst tradition of WROX this book is yet another example of incoherent fragments and inconsistent writing. The reason I broke my rule and bought a WROX book is because there's hardly any (if any at all) decent documentation on Visio and it's *real-world* applications by and for developers. No, this book is not a complete waste of money, but it could be a thousand times better. Read on.

The funnies thing about this book is that right from the outset one of the authors promises that the book would cover *one* and only one real-world solution as opposed to other books who feed you different examples all the time. I read this book from cover to cover and yet... every chapter laid out a different example! ? Note to authors: can you guys at least talk to each other? Let along sync up content.

As far as editing goes... Was there editing done at all? You'll see a number of annoying typos and strange grammatical errors. I also found errors in a few diagrams which is worse than typos.

Chapter 1 starts off with a brief introduction and overview of UML and its basic concepts. It's neither comprehensive or clear enough for beginners, nor is it useful for those who are not new to UML.

Chapter 2 is a nice "tour of Visio" even though they messed up a couple of diagrams so don't count on their accuracy. Very much for beginners.

Chapter 3, "Diagramming Business Objects" is worth the money you paid for this book.

Chapter 6, "Documenting the Project" is totally out of place. It goes back to the basic UML diagram, and whoever wrote this chapter, drew the diagrams in a pretty unorthodox way. A bizarre chapter to say the least.

Chapter 8 is another reason you might want to own a copy of this book. It presents a short yet informative introduction to ORM, creating a database from a model and reverse engineering an existing one.

To sum it up, two stars for the effort and *some* useful content. To those who wrote Chapters 3 and 8 thank you. Other than that---a very sloppy job by WROX yet once again. Not worth the money at all. Get it from bookpook.com for much less or download for free from Usenet.

Rating:
Summary: developer
Review: It is a total mystery to me why this book was written in the first place. From UML standpoint it covers only very basic scenarios. From software perspective it does not cover topics like "..how the hell do I specify .Net attributes and do not lose them in reverse engineering..." or "...why C# documentation is totally incompatible with what Visio produces...". The only thing this book teaches is how to do basic operations, which you probably can figure out on your own after 2 days of pocking around. DO NOT waist you money (I would use 0 star option if it was available)

Rating:
Summary: Could cover more on UML
Review: The book is OK but you really need a book devoted to UML in particular to really make use out of the material in this book.

If you plan on using Visio's UML addin and you want to generate code for a Visual Studio.NET project, you'll need the tool called Kerato. Kerato synchronizes the code generated by Visio's UML addin with code in your Visual Studio.NET project. Kerato will make sure that any changes you make in your UML model will be reflected in your permanent code. This is something the UML addin can't do. Kerato will also synchronize the documentation. ...

Rating:
Summary: Nice book to integrate UML/Visio/dot net skills
Review: There are better books to train developers in individual skills - UML, Visio, dot net. But this book does a nice job tying them altogether - it won't teach you how to model, etc. but does a very good job in applying and integrating all the skills. There are some annoying typos, but no showstoppers.