Book excerpt: Abstraction is the most basic principle of software engineering. Abstractions are provided by models. Modeling and model transformation constitute the core of model-driven development. Models can be refined and finally be transformed into a technical implementation, i.e., a software system. The aim of this book is to give an overview of the state of the art in model-driven software development. Achievements are considered from a conceptual point of view in the first part, while the second part describes technical advances and infrastructures. Finally, the third part summarizes experiences gained in actual projects employing model-driven development. Beydeda, Book and Gruhn put together the results from leading researchers in this area, both from industry and academia. The result is a collection of papers which gives both researchers and graduate students a comprehensive overview of current research issues and industrial forefront practice, as promoted by OMG’s MDA initiative.