"UML is visual enough for many nontechnical members to understand yet formal enough to have significant semantic value." - Jim Conallen

Author Jim Conallen does a good, informative job of describing the procedure for dynamic Web applications in general, and contrasts the unambiguous approaches taken by Microsoft .NET and J2EE. Specifically, he cites the roles played by .NET components in ASP.NET WebForms vs. servlets in JavaServer Pages, and the importance of differentiating between thin clients and thick clients, being Web-based business applications with and without the employ of componentized logic, respectively.

The book's approach is from that of an enterprise, team-oriented approach, as is normally the atmosphere when UML would be needed anyway. Thus, project management skills are engrained. However - and Conallen makes note of this at the onset - a formal amount of experience with dynamic Web programming and a fair share of experience with UML/application modeling is assumed. So, if you're looking to get a primer on UML, you may be disappointed. The UML diagrams and use case scenarios carry little explanation for their graphical meaning, so you're on your own if you don't know what a stereotype is, or a solid triangle, or a dotted line into a class.

That having been said, the book was very informative and nicely written. The book remains as generic as possible throughout, but takes a Java lean in sections where a practical example is necessary to reinforce a stated concept. This won't be too difficult to grasp at a high level for Microsoft-centric developers, as examples are abstracted into high-level architectural points-of-view. (Hey, I was able to figure it out, so any idiot could.)

I was intrigued by the title, as I've been waiting for a book on UML design specific to Web apps to come out. Chapters 11 & 12 in the book are fantastic, as they describes the WAE (Web Application Extension for UML) and modeling with it. One quote really stands out about WAE's growth to programmers, "As they come out of the box, the building blocks of UML are not sufficient to express the necessary subtleties of scripted Web pages as objects in a class diagram. Yet because they perform important business operations and act as real objects of the system, they need to coexist with the classes and the objects of the system."

I'm hopeful for the next version of the book, to see how .NET principles are included.