Doing Hard Time: Developing Real-Time Systems With Uml, Objects, Frameworks, and Patterns 1st Edition

A fantastic description of how to apply UML and OO process to Embedded and Real-Time systems. Bruce does a great job of keeping the material informative and interesting with concrete "real world" examples. I especially enjoyed the discussion of process and which UML artifacts are used in what phase of development and why. This book has quickly become required reading in my organization. If you want a UML book that provides "how to" knowledge without the doctoral dissertation, then this is for you.

The book appears to be a testament to "why I am good" rather than a description of the topic at hand. Editorially, figures don't match text, grammar is expansive and lacks understandability, it is difficult to determine whether words used are used in their English or technical sense, and the use of words requiring dictionary lookup is laudable in grade schools somewhat suspect in a book of this caliber (try 'reify'). Technically little scholarship is shown. The section titles are good, the author often strays from them. For analysis of embedded systems, trivial results are stated and no attention is given to their derivation nor to analysis or references to analysis. Little attention is paid topics beyond their brief statement. Much time is wasted on examples which show the authors work engagements but which do not illustrate the point at hand. Critical topics (for embedded systems) need greater attention and technical analysis rather than restating obvious results and hand-waving (tasking, inter-task message passing, event disposition, etc). The employment of statecharts in situations that it is unsuited to is difficult to understand. The placement and analysis of statecharts within the context of UML, and the technical and organizational difficulties and advantages of statecharts within the context of UML need some discussion.The obvious needs discussion and scholarly treatment, analytical results, including mathematical formulas, and not restatement and explanation by (generally poor) example.A terrible, terrible book which needs scholarship for it's improvement. Full of pointless examples and lack of technical discussion.

I read this book as a first introduction to OO real time computing. I liked the introduction that covers the three topics of OO, RT systems and fault tolerance (though it does not connect the three topics in any sense). I gave up reading the book after the chapter on method, though I skipped through the remaining chapters. The rest of the book was mainly old stuff on waterfall models and OOA/OOD. The whole book was also very commercial and connected to a specific product from the company that the author works for. There was no comparison to other (in my opinion superior) methods and tools.Instead of buying this book I would recommend you to buy an established book on real time systems and an established book on OO. You will end up spending less money and get a better overview of the two fields by reading fewer pages.

Everything I have said for RT UML holds for this book also: a MUST HAVE for embedded developers. This book adds to the previous one from Douglass a lot of material (it definitely includes the material presented in that one) but the main advantage for me is the plethora of design patterns for real-time described. Since this is a very large book, it does not prove as easy to read through, but the additional material is definitely worth it. Finally, another plus point is that the accompanying CD includes a lightweight demo of Rhapsody - the tool from I-Logix that amongst other things claims full code generation. END

Even though this book focuses on object-oriented software development for real-time systems, I am certain that it can serve as a valuable source of insight for all developers - including those working on systems outside the targeted area or using alternative approaches. It is very comprehensive and provides clearly written discussions on many subjects which are generally not properly treated in other software development texts. Examples of such topics are: frameworks, patterns, statecharts, threads, architectural design and safety requirements. The author's conversational style combined with effective use of humour ensure that reading the more than 700 pages of this book will not be regarded as "doing hard time" but rather as an enjoyable experience.