Book excerpt: Written by internationally-acclaimed trainer and developer Scott Ambler, this book is a must-have resource for designers, programmers and testers of today's OO applications. The author takes you through the entire process of building object applications, from analyzing the project, to designing a user-friendly interface, to testing your approaches to make sure your applications work properly. Building Object Applications That Work includes sections on: how to use the Unified Modeling Language effectively; analysis, so you know what you need to build; design techniques, so that you know how you are going to build your application; collecting the right metrics to improve your development approach; applying OO patterns to improve the quality of your applications; creating applications for stand-alone, client/server and distributed environments; using both relational and object-oriented databases to make your objects persistent; and architecting your applications so they are maintainable and extensible.