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Firstly I must say I am not a member of the 'UML is the solution to all modelling problems' camp. It's good, but not a panacea for all problems. Also the CD in the back of the book, as stated on the book cover, has some of the models used on the book, not (unfortunately) any trial type edition of Rose. I'm not sure why they didn't just make it downloadable. Now we have those out of the way, the book review.

This book seems to be aimed at a fairly specific market. It doesn't try and teach you UML from the ground up and people who are already UML experts will probably not need this kind of book to get started with Rose. The book assumes some basic knowledge of UML and an installed copy of Rose. It starts with the very basics of using Rose, even telling you that the magnifying glass is a zoom tool; using numbered bullets for stepping through fairly obvious menu trees and screen shots for the font selection window did seem rather silly to me.

After the first couple of chapters, the level of detail changes to a much more sensible one and the book explains things with a nice blend of problem to model, the kind of UML approach that you use and then how to actually do it in Rose. Along the way there are a few handy hints and tips to help you use Rose effectively. Most of the last quarter of the book is devoted to code generation (C++/Java and VB), which I thought was a little excessive in terms of space devoted to it, though the DTD generation was interesting. That may just be my prejudice against generated code. It would have been nice to see a completed worked example in the book, but maybe they felt that was more the province of books teaching UML.

Overall, after a bit of a slow start, I found the book quite helpful. It is a bit verbose in places and could easily have been shortened by 100 pages. If you already know the basics of UML and need some help translating that into the practicalities of using Rose, then you should find this book useful.