Head First Software Development

Appendix A. Leftovers: The top 5 topics (we didn’t cover)

Ever feel like something’s missing? We know what you mean...

Just when you thought you were done... there’s more. We couldn’t leave you without a few extra things, things we just couldn’t fit into the rest of the book. At least, not if you want to be able to carry this book around without a metallic case and castor wheels on the bottom. So take a peek and see what you (still) might be missing out on.

#1. UML class diagrams

When you were developing the iSwoon application in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, we described the design using UML, the Unified Modeling Language, which is a language used to communicate just the important details about your code and application’s structure that other developers and customers need, without getting into things that aren’t necessary.

UML is a great way of working through your design for iSwoon without getting too bogged down in code. After all, it’s pretty hard to look at 200 lines of code and focus on the big picture.

A class diagram describes the static structure of your classes.

Class diagrams show relationships

Classes in your software don’t exist in a vacuum, they interact with each other at runtime and have relationships to each other. In this book you’ve seen two relationships, called association ...