UML distilled
by Martin Fowler · first published 1997
60% recommend33% neutral7% critical
Why HN recommends it
A short, pragmatic introduction to UML that teaches enough to sketch diagrams and discuss software architecture. It is a to-the-point summary written for working developers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"Now widely adopted as the de facto industry standard and sanctioned by the Object Management Group, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation all software developers need to know and understand. However, the UML is comprehensive in scope, and not all of it is equally important. The award-winning first edition of UML Distilled was widely praised for being a concise guide to the core parts of the UML and has proved extremely successful in helping developers get up and running quickly. UML Distilled, Second Edition, maintains the concise format but adds significantly updated coverage of
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…the kind of thing we've been hearing for decades. And it never pans out. The closest thing we have is UML. Look, I love UML, and I'm probably one of the last holdouts for it -- I read Martin Fowler's UML Distilled years ago and still use those techniques to this day. But I've never used it to generate code (a la Rational), or to fully diagram an entire system. Even with a human editor reducing the noise and focusing…
on “NoFlo: Help Everyone To Understand And Visualize Code” ↗…extremely helpful when modeling service architectures especially. I understand why many coders avoid it, but I also think it's unfortunate that UML has the reputation it does. I read Martin Fowler's UML Distilled (and I still recommend it) years ago. It made sense to me then, still does.
on “UML in Practice” ↗Learn to sketch UML (not use it as a formal development language) -- it's incredibly useful if you don't get too caught up in formalities. "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler is a tiny book that teaches you enough to sketch it. I made a UML cheatsheet a while ago for a talk: http://loufranco.com/blog/uml-cheatsheet
on “Ask HN: Is UML still relevant today?” ↗…ends of the chapters), my girlfriend is going through my copy. ~$20. A couple Oreily books for whatever you're doing at work ~$120 (although double check, believe it or not there are a couple duds.) UML distilled by Martin Fowler is very good. ~$20? The art of electronics is a great book, I personally learned a lot from this kind of weird book titled "Basic Pulse Circuits" I found at a used book store for ~$10.…
on “Ask HN: You've got $300 to fill an empty library. What do you choose?” ↗…useful as well, and you can mix and match various UML elements in them, it's a very flexible visual language. Also state diagrams, of course, as a sibling already noted. I can recommend Martin Fowler's "UML Distilled" for a pragmatic approach (ISBN 9780321193681).
on “UML: My Part in Its Downfall” ↗…what in a diagram. One powerful aspect of UML is that you can combine different diagram types. For example, you can use activity-diagram elements in parts of a sequence diagram. For pragmatic use, “UML Distilled” [0] by Martin Fowler is a good introduction and reference. [0] https://martinfowler.com/books/uml.html
on “Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development” ↗I like "UML Distilled, 3rd Edition" by Martin Fowler. Good to-the-point introduction and summary.
on “Underappreciated Books to Learn Object Oriented Design and UML?” ↗…Programming Language - Stroustrup The Scheme Programming Language - Dybvig Practical Common LISP - Seibel Programming Perl - Wall, Christiansen and Orwant ANSI Common Lisp - Graham Refactoring - Fowler UML Distilled - Fowler Introduction to the Theory of Computation - Sisper Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - MacKay Modern Operating Systems - Tanenbaum On Lisp - Graham Hackers & Painters…
on “ASK HN: Hacker Bibles” ↗…in whitepapers, technical documentation, or engineering discussion, use UML. I'd hoped that at the least UML would introduce a shared vocabulary, but within my experience it hasn't. Reading Fowler's “UML Distilled”, on the other hand, did teach me a lot about software architecture and design, and it also taught me to read the rest of Fowler's work, which has been equally rewarding.
on “Ask HN: Is UML still relevant today?” ↗Tl;dr use strategy pattern where applicable. One of the best programming books I read was UML Distilled (which introduced the idea of some pattern beside teaching UML) and Design Patterns (Shalloway, Trott). The moment I started reading this post I thought “that’s a strategy pattern use case”. And that’s…
on “Write Code Like You Write a Recipe” ↗Yup, and the only UML book I ever bought and used, UML Distilled, was written by Fowler and Kendall Scott. It's a slim book, and notably says little to nothing about UML as a CASE tool. There's definitely nothing about any specific program for generating code, and…
on “Why UML “Really” Died” ↗…folks: RUP, or the Rational Unified Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software#UML_and_RUP There was a little overlap; in particular, Martin Fowler wrote an intentionally thin book called "UML Distilled". But the UML world was generally heavy on both up-front architecture and formal, heavyweight design process. The Agile world at the time was energetically opposed to that, thinking that the main value…
on “Scrum disempowers developers” ↗"When to Use Iterative Development You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed." -- Martin Fowler, UML Distilled
on “Iterative development: the secret to great product launches” ↗…decided to "Unify". Most the the UML hype was about adoption and market penetration in order to get to an exit. Others were caught up in the hype and made some money too, such as Martin Fowler, who wrote UML distilled and went on to agile and Thoughtworks. Special mention to the now-unknown Alistair Cockburn who wrote a book and did a lot of consulting around the confusion of use cases. In today's language, Rational…
on “Has UML died without anyone noticing?” ↗…I just said, I rarely produce any diagrams. I've been active as a developer since before UML got popular and then peaked and then faded into obscurity. I still have a signed (by Martin Fowler) copy of UML distilled on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. First edition and everything. I don't think it's very valuable. Waste paper basically. But contact me if you feel otherwise. It's in pristine condition because I never…
on “Mermaid: Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text” ↗