Rating: 
Summary: A good overview.
Review: I read this book, along with Entsminger's Tao of Objects, when I needed to gain a good "technical lay person's" understanding of object-oriented technology. Though I've since done some rudimentary programming to hammer home the key concepts, I recommend both books.
Rating: 
Summary: Great overview how object technology fits modern soft. devel
Review: I used this book before I knew what object technology was all about. It gave me an incentive to re-tool my skills. I am now using it as a marketing tool to my management to let them know how object technology can solve some of our most basic software dilemnas.
Rating:
Summary: Great when starting from zero
Review: I was frustrated with most of the material I came across on the subject of object technology when I first began to learn about it. I had a fair amount of programming experience in so-called structured techniques. When I wanted to learn about objects, everything I got hold of assumed I already knew the fundamental concepts and so either omitted any discussion entirely, or glossed over the basics and moved you right in to teaching some language. I was getting nowhere until I happened across this book.Regardless of why you want to get a grip on object technology this book does a good job of introducing the fundamental concepts. It is not trying not to teach you a programming or modeling language, which was just the angle I needed. I'm pretty visually oriented and I found the illustrations quite helpful. The foundation I got from this this book enabled me to finally move on to more meaty things. You don't have to be technical to deal with this book. Some of the later chapters may be more than what some people need, and the author's choice of evolution as an example of an object-oriented system may aggravate some readers. I would recommend this book to mangers, technical writers, educators, and students as a good first book on the subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth if you have even a rough idea about objects
Review: I'm a programmer with no real experience about object oriented programming. This book did not add any value to the few concepts I knew. I would suggest this book just to people who do not really know anything about object orientation (even if in those people this book can rise some expectations which will be hard to get...)
Rating: 
Summary: OK, but limited. There are better alternatives
Review: If you are new to OO and want to learn, this isn't a bad place to start. It is an exceptionally well laid-out book, very useful for reference, and covers the basics of OO in clear language. It is a very useful aid to demystifying OO jargon. But it does make it all sound too easy and ignores or understates the practical difficulties of OO development. A major theme of this book is that OO, used correctly, will create adaptable systems. (Interestingly, Dr Taylor admits that OO hasn't fulfilled its early promises of more rapid system development.) Some superficial analogies of Objects with cellular organisms are made to this point, but Dr Taylor offers no hard real-world evidence for his claims. This is a major fault with the book as a whole. I was surprised by someone with a PhD would make so many assertions with so little hard evidence. One such assertion is "legacy integration is easy", proposing the solution of "wrapping" to deal with legacy systems. Anyone with practical experience will know this is hopelessly simplistic. If you have a million lines of ancient COBOL and you need to change the internal logic of the newly wrapped "object", you've still got the same problem as before. The section on Object Databases is another case in point. Again, the basics were well communicated but the with little consideration of their downside, or how successful RDMS's (and more recently hybrid DBs) have been in recent years. IT departments will be very reluctant to scrap RDMS's and replace them with object DBs after spending years getting RDMSs to work well, and give users query tools they can use effectively. I'd need a lot of convincing, with hard, objective evidence, before using an Object DB rather than tried and tested RDMS on an industrial-strength project. (The author was employed by Gemstone - is his view completely objective?) The problems, limits and costs of OO development are barely touched upon. For a balanced view, I would strongly recommend reading Alistair Cockburn's excellent "Surviving Object-Oriented Projects" as an antidote to the more fanciful claims made in this book. Or as an alternative introduction to OO, plus a lot more, I would recommend Mielir Page-Jones's "Fundamentals of OO Design Using UML" ahead of Dr. Taylor's book.
Rating:
Summary: The best non-technical introduction to OOP
Review: Managers of software projects need to understand the fundamentals of object-oriented programming before they can effectively communicate with the developers they are managing. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of object-oriented programming at the level of someone with a limited technical background. In that sense, it is an overwhelming success. I have taught object-oriented programming to experienced programmers for many years. When I first read this book in 1998, I was so impressed with some of the explanations that I have used modifications of them in my classes. There is no code in the book, most of the main ideas are demonstrated by diagram.
Although the programming world continues to change at a rapid rate, this is still the best introduction to the principles of object-oriented programming that is available to the non-technical person.
Rating:
Summary: The best concise introduction to object-oriented technology
Review: Note that, although the subtitle for this text implies Taylor's audience is solely managers, this book is suitable for anyone looking for a concise introduction to object-oriented software technology. Simply ignore some of the negative comments in other reviews regarding this book's viability in relation to early 21st-century software development - like almost every text written for an information technology audience, parts of this book, especially some of the predictions Taylor makes in the last chapters (at least in the first edition of the text), have been outmoded by lessons learned or shifts of focus in the past decade. Simply purchase the latest edition of texts such as this, especially if you are new to the topic - just remember that the new edition will undoubtedly be outmoded again in the future, but by that time you will probably have a handle on the topic and not need to refer back (at least very often) to an introductory text. What I like best about this text are the following: its conciseness (less than 150 pages) and compactness, its readability (very simple language - it is not written to impress by use of an extensive vocabulary), and its diagrams. As an individual who enjoys proper use of effective visual communication when technical topics are addressed, the simple diagrams are excellent - his use of the living cell as a model in understanding object basics like data and methods is ingenious, in my opinion. No code in this text, you say? If one is looking for an introductory OO text, why would he/she need code? Use of code would not only defeat the purpose of this text, but outmode it as soon as the next language of the day/week/month/year comes into fashion.
Rating: 
Summary: Over-emphasizes Hierarchies
Review: The author presents and illustrates his points rather well in this book. However, he is over-selling certain concepts and philosophies as the be-all-solve-all; in particular, trees and nesting of application nouns (objects). Although trees and nesting are intuitive, they don't always map to the real world very well. A relational expert will point out that trees and nesting are only one of many possible simultaneous views of any given thing. Taylor presents an absolute viewpoint, suggesting that trees and nesting ALONE are a sufficient view of any given object. OOP (object oriented programming) tends to get rather complicated and competes with relational turf when it tries to give each object (record) multiple, relative, or ad-hoc views and relationships. A relational proponent may suggest that it is best not to manage all these relationships via programming code, since databases are better geared toward bulk cross-link management of "things". Further, Taylor's prediction that OO databases would trample relational databases has proven incorrect so far. OO databases have suffered huge commercial set-backs, and he offers insufficient information on how to handle OO in a relational world. Some OO proponents, such as Bertrand Meyer, have even suggested that the philosophy of OOP and "databases" in general is in conflict. Overall, this book may serve as a decent conceptual introduction, but it leaves out some important and tough philosophical rough spots that OO faces. I would suggest that one also read up on relational modeling to balance out the weak points of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction and explanation of the concept
Review: The book has been excellent in explaining the benefits and reasons to use OO technology. Though most part of the book covers only conceptual ideas, it is definitely suitable for beginners of OO programming and for people who would like to know more on OO. Persoanlly I like this book very much.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book for all Senior Consultants and Managera
Review: The book is written in a very lucid and simple language and unlike any other technica book, I could not keep the book down and read it in less than a day. The book is useful for all Programmers essentially to change their mindset of Procedural programming and shif their mind into the Hig geared Object Technology.
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