Two different approaches to examples are used in different texts. Some authors (and readers) prefer a single example taken throughout the entire book to illustrate the various concepts. The other approach is to use many different examples with the idea being that it is more useful to see the concepts used in a wide variety of applications. This book uses a compromise approach. A variety of real-time examples illustrate the concepts and notation of UML in the several different real-time application domains, but they reappear in different chapters of the book. This approach reinforces the concepts by showing how they apply in various situations. Special care has been taken to select real-time examples with rich behavioral semantics, however examples which are not strictly real-time are used where appropriate. Bruce Powel Douglass, Ph.D. |