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From: render@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Seeking review of Booch's new book
Message-ID: <77500043@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 18 Jul 90 15:03:00 GMT
References: <139084@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
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Nf-ID: #R:sun.Eng.Sun.COM:139084:m.cs.uiuc.edu:77500043:000:2714
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!render    Jul 18 10:03:00 1990


Written 11:05 pm  Jul 17, 1990 by vladimir@prosper:
>Is anyone willing to post (if it hasn't been done already) a review of Grady
>Booch's new book, "Object Oriented Design with Applications" (title?), or
>e-mail it to me if it's old hat?

I got the book a while back and read through it last week.  Here are my 
general impressions:

Booch's new book attempts to outline a methodical approach to OO system
design.  The introductory chapters provide an overview of general design 
and OO design principles.  The middle chapters describe his OO design
notation, a combination of graph diagrams and document templates. The
latter chapters show how the design principles and notation may be applied
to sample problems.

I found Booch's discussion of design principles to be quite good, with many
references to other work in and out of the OO area.  His notation seems to 
be better than other OO analysis/design notations I have seen (e.g. Shlaer 
and Mellor or Coad and Yourdon), mostly because it supports several 
inter-object and inter-class relationships.  His applications examples also 
seem good, since he chooses examples from a wide range of areas (control 
systems, software tools, AI) with different support mechanisms (a DBMS, a 
blackboard system).  His references and bibliography are excellent, so much
so that I recommend reading the book if only to peruse the list of sources.

My only misgivings (and they are not strong ones) are that he uses five 
different languages for the examples (Smalltalk, CLOS, C++, Object Pascal
and Ada) and that the last, Ada, is not really an OOPL at all.  Because I 
have had experience with all of the languages, the variety didn't impair 
my reading of the text, but I believe that someone with a more limited 
background could have trouble.  The inclusion of Ada is understandable 
given Booch's background (he has written several books on Ada and works 
for a leading Ada vendor), but I question it's use when it requires "coding 
discipline" to do things in an OO manner.  Still, this may actually be good 
for those software developers who have to use non-OO languages but wish to 
experiment with OO design.  I think Booch recognizes this audience since he 
supports both a "logical view" (pure OO) and a "physical view" (possibly 
non-OO) of a system with his design notation.  This could widen the interest 
in OO design and overcome the "cult" label that currently plagues it.

In summary, I recommend the book, and I'm looking forward to trying out
his notation.  Speaking of this, does anyone know if there are any 
support tools available for his diagrams and templates?  Please e-mail 
me or post it to the net.  Thanks.

hal render
render@cs.uiuc.edu