Review on the book "UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language (3rd Edition)"
UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language (3rd Edition) by Martin Fowler, published by Addison-Wesley Professional in September 2003.
This is a short book that describes how to use UML in software development. The author describes only those UML diagrams that are most commonly used. This is especially appreciated by busy developers who don't want to or simply don't have time to study UML in depth but still want to use standardized notations and diagrams to facilitate communications during design and implementation. Another practical consideration is that if you know and use too many advanced UML notations and diagrams in your design, you essentially force other people who don't know much about UML to spend much more time to study it to understand your design which then impedes communications and defeats the original purpose.
Because of the conciseness of the book, the author has to use very simple examples for illustration which are not seen in practice. For example, how often do people need to model the relationship between Person, Meeting and Attendance? Readers are encouraged to learn modeling by applying UML to their daily software development practice.