Rating: 
Summary: A wealth of experience and knowledge
Review: This is a great book covering the whole development
process, based in the Rational Unified Process and
with good explanations about how to make good
use of UML.
It has great advice in every step from someone
that obviously has been in many situations with as
many clients.
It is well written, a book you'll enjoy from cover to cover.
The only thing it could improve on is to mention a few
patterns. The final design of the application actually uses
a few patterns, but there's no mention to any of them.
It'd be great to compare the proposed solution with
common bad practices, and to point out the pattern implemented
and other related ones.
Rating: 
Summary: 6 Stars will be a more apt rating!!
Review: This is a one-in-a-million technology book that makes sense from multiple angles. Most UML books are written by researchers that tend to have a myopic view on a project's scope. My impression from reading the book is that Paul Reed, the author, knows the theory and is experienced at practicing this theory - a rare find.This book fully encompasses a whole project view and succesfully involves/educates the reader. Let me explain : It is challenging to develop a book that covers OOP, UML, Rational Unified Process(RUP), Java/J2EE, Application Servers/IDE etc. Also most publishers will not touch such a subject assuming it will narrow the potential readership. Having heap all the flatery, I must add some caution - to fully make sense of the book the rader must be somewhat familiar with some of the concepts - i.e. OOP, Java. Otherwise it can be hard to grasp. I would recommend this book to developers/managers that wish to enhance their requirements process in software development. In this book you can expect to visualise the role of UML in the full cycle of a project. The development process followed is RUP. There are nice background information on how to enhance the productivity of the development team in the design stages. The project discussed is a typical J2EE set-up - JSP, Servlets, choice of Javabeans and EJB, choice of Tomcat or BEA WebLogic and a Microsoft SQL Server (or Oracle) as the back-end. I hope this review helps - please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: Great "Big Picture" Book
Review: This is an excellent book for programmers new to Java, UML and Java architecture. This is not a complete book on UML, patterns, EJB or Java but that is not its intention. The author does an excellent job of taking the rational unified process and UML and breaking it down to the relevant artifacts and diagrams. It contains excellent examples and doesn't try to over simplify. I highly recommend this book to development teams that are beginning to embark on Java web applications from other programming languages. My only warning is that if you are unfamiliar with basic Java patterns (session façade, controller), you may get a little lost. It helps to have a basic understanding of Java and OOP. The book does get into EJBs but not enough to start coding your own EJB application but you will get the big picture and that is the best way to view this book. This book was required reading for a project that we are currently doing. I am managing a team with some developers new to Java but had extensive VB experience. They found that this book helped then "think in Java" I supplemented my reading with other books like Mastering Enterprise Java Beans by Ed Roman and the Sun J2EE Core Patterns Book. There is a decent book called Advanced Case Modeling if you want to get a different view on use case designs. I would like to add that the book uses a session façade controller for each use case. The book doesn't really stress the consequences of doing this. The definition of a use case is as quite broad. Some architects prefer fine-grained use cases to course-grained. This book has you using course-grained. This is important so that you don't end up with too many controllers which can translate to hundreds of session beans. Make sure that you develop your use cases in a course-grained manner to avoid this problem. In addition, the book's example uses value object creation at the entity bean level. This could be abstracted to a value bean assembler.
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