UML@Classroom: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Modeling

The textbook UML@Classroom, now available in English [8] and German [7], evolved from a first semester course on object-oriented modeling at the Vienna University of Technology. Object-oriented modeling is a mandatory course for first-year computer science and business informatics students. Up to 1,000 students are attending this course per year and they have a very heterogeneous background on modeling and programming ranging from complete beginners to experienced software developers. One of the main challenges is to provide a solid basis to the beginners and to offer further material interesting to the advanced students by covering both the theoretical background as well as practical modeling. Details on the course organization are given in [2–6]. Despite our comprehensive teaching material (lecture videos, annotated slides, various kinds of self-assessments), we were regularly asked for a book accompanying the lecture. While many books on UML and object-oriented modeling are available, there was no book on the market which fitted our specific requirements: mostly the books were either too advanced or too high-level for our course, too specialized, too complicated, without examples, or simply outdated. UML@Classroom was written with the aim to give a quick, but precise introduction to the world of UML and to provide an overview of the most important UML concepts and their relationships. The focus of the book is set on object-oriented modeling whose basics are shortly recapitulated while introducing graphical notation and the syntax and semantics of UML. Illustrative and intuitive examples all stemming from the university domain show how the various concepts are individually used in the respective diagrams and how they are interrelated if a model consists of multiple diagrams. We abstained from presenting UML in all details, but we focused on the most widely used subset. In particular, we introduced the use case diagram, the class diagram with the object diagram, the state machine diagram, the sequence diagram, and the activity digram as well as their interplay. We also indicated the steps to be taken to turn a diagram into code and show some practical applications. Without going into the details, we also mention that UML itself is based on a metamodel which in turn is based on a metametamodel and that there are many more concepts which are then covered in the more advanced literature. However, we do not show the UML metamodel because in our experience, the introduction of this additional layer easily confuses beginners. …