This is a really great book. It goes into detail about an improved version of the lifecycle for the Unified Process, clearly the authors put some significant thought into it. What I really like is that this book collects some great articles from Software Development magazine that cover topics that the RUP barely covers if it touches them at all. For example there's an article on CRC modeling, a low tech way to model the classes within your problem space, which really does support one of the book's claims that the RUP's "use case driven" philosophy is questionable at best. They also make a valid point that you can test during the Inception Phase and go on to present several really excellent articles to that point. Ambler's Full Lifecycle Object-Oriented Testing (FLOOT) methodology is summarized in the testing chapter as well, a topic that they go into further detail in their other books. Karl Wiegers' article on customer rights and responsibilities really made sense to me, I'm into XP, so I went out and bought Wieger's book called Software Requirements as a result. Jim Highsmith and Lynne Nix's article on feasibility studies was also really good, along with all the others in this book. It's amazing how this book collects some of the best material written by the best minds in the computer industry.

Personally, I can't imagine anyone adopting the RUP without first reading this book series. I think it's great that someone has gone to the effort to sort through the best articles written by some of the best minds in this industry. Kudos to Ambler and Constantine for having the courage to stand up and say what many others have been afraid to.

This book presents some very interesting articles. Sure, they sometimes go beyond the original scope of the RUP but that's exactly why you need to read these books. We're implementing the RUP in my company and these books helped us to fill in the missing techniques. The new workflows, Infrastructure Management and Operations & Support, are right on the money. We've benefitted immensely from the concept of Infrastructure Management because it describes how to attain higher levels of reuse within our department, how to develop a shared architecture and enterprise requirements model that all projects can benefit from, and how to manage resources across multiple projects. The RUP only focuses on the development of a single project, which is okay, but it isn't what my company needed. Without Infrastructure Management the RUP is virtually useless to us. Too bad Ambler and Constantine don't work for Rational, because if they did the RUP might actually be usable.

Once again Scott Ambler has managed to bring together a well organized, detailed, view of a very complex topic. The Inception phase, has become a well worn reference book on my desk ( right nexdt to Scott's other Unified Process Books ).

I highly recommend this to anyone looking for insight into proven approached to problem solving. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

This is good book book for someone that already does some object oriented programming and would like to learn the whole OO process. The author does a good job but the graphics came out pretty horrible, you can barely read them.

Ambler's book contains a great deal of helpful information about the entire process of object-oriented software development, much of which I will put to good use. But the typography of the sidebars (definitions and tips) is unreadable, figures are often amateurish in appearance and sometimes superfluous, the information on Java is outdated, and the author's bias toward Smalltalk (almost all of the examples are written in it) is somewhat annoying.

Lots of books give lots of theory, but this book really tells you how to do it. He makes sense. His approach is practical and his implementation explanations are useable.