On the surface, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a visual language for capturing software designs and patterns. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find that UML can be applied to quite a few different areas and can capture and communicate everything from company organization to business processes to distributed enterprise software. It is intended to be a common way of capturing and expressing relationships, behaviors, and high-level ideas in a notation that's easy to learn and efficient to write. UML is visual; just about everything in it has a graphical representation. Throughout this book we'll discuss the meaning behind the various UML elements as well as their representations.
If you're new to UML, you should be sure to read this chapter all the way through to get acquainted with the basic terminology used throughout the book. If you are a developer, class diagrams tend to be the simplest diagrams to start with because they map closely to code. Pick a program or domain you know well, and try to capture the entities involved using classes. Once you're convinced you've modeled the relationships between your entities correctly, pick a piece of functionality and try to model that using a sequence diagram and your classes.
If you're more of a process person (business or otherwise), you may be more comfortable starting with an activity diagram. Chapter 9 shows examples of modeling business processes with different groups (Human Resources, IT, etc.) and progresses to modeling parallel processes over different geographic regions.
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