After having used ER modeling with extreme frustration, I finally decided to investigate something new. This is the bible for ORM, and ORM is just so far superior to ER for conceptual modeling, which I now realize is critical.

Conceptual modeling means modeling your data in a way that makes sense to everyone, from the business experts (who know nothing about databases) to the coders and DBA's. And ORM provides a logical, intuitive way to do this.

Once you've got a conceptual model, it's pretty straightforward to get an ER model, from which you can develop the logical databased design. In fact, MS Visio (forget which version) does this for you.

The reason ER fails is that it cannot model data in a stable way. It still has a place, but ORM is so much more powerful, scalable, and stable.

And not only will you learn about ORM (he has great exercises to help practice), but you will learn a lot about data in general.

This is the best technical/developer/software engineering book I have ever read.

As other readers have indicated, this book is cheesey. And the techniques are fundatmentally flawed. The book is so poorly written as to be almost laughable.

For many if not most of you, VITO doesn't want to hear what you have to say, and he's not the guy making the decision. Parinello is just plain wrong. He has a few valid points, but they're so interspersed with garbage that it's hard to cull them out.

You won't be worse off for reading this book, other than the time you've lost. You'll pick up a few important sales concepts. But how are you going to know which ones they are?

Finally, I'll say the author is somewhat bold in his claims. Like one of his claims to write back to every piece of correspondance he receives. I'm still waiting, Tony, 6 months later!

This book provides you with patterns for creating conceptual data models. It's not practical, though, in that it does not provide insight into how to go from conceptual to real. In fact, it's almost useless.

These "patterns" are nothing more than concepts that good data modelers instinctively know already.

Also, his ER modeling techniques are a bit outdated.

Finally, this book is very, very dense and difficult to read. He just describes how to set up the models in very dense language, without going into the why's. It becomes virtually unreadable after the second or third pattern.

There are other, more recent books out there which provide better, more up to date thinking on this nascent topic (which I believe is still years, if not decades away from truly practical modeling/process techniques).

I had been "winging it" (as Whil might say) for critical pieces of the software development process. The most obvious example comes in the area of pricing. A customer tells you what they need, then they invariably ask how much. How do you answer that question? Whil lists 5 of the most common techniques, which are all variations of "winging it." I had probably tried all 5. After educating you on the various processes you may incorporate, he explains a very practical way to go about pricing applications. It's not easy, but it's extremely valuable.

After reading this book, I now see that before you can understand how to price a system, you have to understand your processes. Are you using structured development, RAD, or Agile Methodologies? A big part of the process of pricing involves educating your customers and managing expectations, two things I had always tried to do but until reading Whil's book, I wasn't sure how to do.

But pricing is just the tip of the iceberg. He has great, actionable, generally easy to implement suggestions for running your business (or department). For example, I had always been of the mindset that a big job is a good job (it means lots of money, right?). This just ain't so. Whil has a great quote in there - I'm just paraphrasing, but it's something to the effect of "if you can't say no to a job, then you'll soon be working for someone who can." He really covers all aspects of the business, including marketing, hiring, etc.

If you're looking for specific programming techniques, you won't find them here. This is all about process, and running a software business. But I realize more than ever that process is as important as the specific programming technologies you use, and ignoring process represents a huge risk to your business.

If you run your own show (or ever want to) and don't have clearly defined, effective processes in place, this book is a must have. I'm sure it's equally effective for corporate developers looking to run their departments more efficiently.