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Title: What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development by C. J. Date ISBN: 0-201-70850-7 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 12 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Yes, I agree. Now what?
Comment: In this short (about 120 pages) book, Date makes a persuasive case that the future of programming is in rule-based programming. If, instead of writing procedural code, we simply described the business rules of our data model and the development system then determined when to apply the rules, and how to do so efficiently, we could achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in development productivity.
I enjoyed reading this book (it didn't take long), but I found myself thinking "Yes, I agree totally, now what?" I am not sure who the book is aimed at. Is it aimed at software vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, to suggest the kind of tools that they should be offering the rest of us, or is it aimed at people like me, involved in developing systems within a typical commercial environment? If the latter, then beyond emphasizing that we should strive to put as much as possible in our data model (for example, creating a view instead of accessing a base table filtered by a WHERE clause), it's not clear what we should do to follow Date's advice. How should my development practices change as a result of reading this book? I don't know.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting ideas, but things aren't as bad as described
Comment: First off, it is difficult to give a fair review to a book with a copywrite date of 2000 that I am just now reading. The concepts are interesting and reasonable, but I don't think the state of things is as bad as the author suggests. Section II wraps up by stating that business rules *should* be able to be expressed in constraints, but the SQL vendors have let us down in this area. I find that most of the constraints that the author describes are supported by Oracle 8i which is not a new release of the product. Much is made of automating business rules using Rule Engines, but it seems that these can be handled in the DBMS. The advice on data modeling in the last chapter is good, and I think you can come away with a different way of looking at things. After reading the book, though, I am not overwhelmed with the urgent need to have my team invest in a Business Rules Engine.
Rating: 3
Summary: A reasonable introduction with pitiful worked examples
Comment: At first I was pleased with this Book, but as I progressed through the Chapters I got progressively more disappointed. In conclusion, I think the comments on the back page say it all "provides a good grounding" - I'd rate it 'average to good' - but certainly not 'excellent'.
What lets it down are the pitiful worked examples. They are key to explaining the concepts, but the choices are terrible. They focus on Inventory Control, but I wonder if the author has ever done any real analysis in this arena?
In Chapter 4 a few examples are introduced, that reappear throughout the book, for example :
(a) "Suppliers S1 and S4 are always in the same City" - and this is reaffirmed as 'being not all unrealistic'
(b) "Suppliers in Athens can move only to London or Paris"
(c) "Average shipment quantities never decrease"
but in my 25 years experience in systems design I could never imagine these rules as being acceptable in their own right, never mind as 'classics' to be used in training/education?
When one finds poor examples like this, it always make me wonder whether there's other topics in the book that in my naivety I am accepting hook, line & sinker, and others readers more familiar than me would similarly find to be in error? I suppose I'll never know. So I still need to read further about the topic in case I've been misinformed; so if you're going to buy one book about business rules - then this isn't the one.
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