Friday 23 April 2010

The Syntropy book is available online for free

Back in the days when modelling wasn't a dirty word, Steve Cook and I wrote a book that showed how to create precise graphical models of situations and software, and use those models to drive a development process. It was called Designing Object Systems: Object-Oriented Modelling with Syntropy and was published in 1994.


We didn't get rich from sales of the book but it was influential. Many of our ideas ended up in the UML, and the UML's Object Constraint Language was directly based on our work. Also, the book remains probably the most comprehensive reference on the use of state machines to describe object behaviour.

The book has been out of print for some while, but if you would like to take a look the whole book is now available online at www.syntropy.co.uk/syntropy. I'd love to know what you think.

2 comments:

John Zabroski said...

I've read your book. Actually, I just bought it six months before you made it freely available. I've been going through all the OOP literature in the past 20 years, books, articles, etc. and trying to form a picture of the good, the bad, the ugly.

What other treatments do you know of for using state machines to describe behavior?

John Zabroski said...

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