Principles of the Business Rule Approach
Ronald G. Ross


Compras Nikon
Bluetooth
1 Too Much Fluff!
I generally refrain from purchasing books that only have 2 or less reviews unless it is referred by a friend or college because I generally assume they were written by close friends of the author. This time I decided to take a gamble due to the dearth of reading material on this topic. While the book bring ups a lot of good concepts it is amazingly lacking in others.

Pros:
1) Chapter on rule speak was pretty good
2) The chapter on fact models is ok. The back of the book says "in depth look at fact models". This is not true. It was severely deficient. A fact model is so similar to a class diagram. You are better off reading books on class diagramming and applying those principles and knowledge to rules.
3) Discussion of rule classifications was very good

Cons
1) The book has 372 pages but if you remove the appendixes, glossary and index you are left with 284. The appendixes were useless and felt like filler. All terms in the glossary were defined elsewhere in the book
2) The author particular use of footnotes was distracting. This was by far my biggest pet peeve of the book. a) Many notes were used to advertise the author's company products and services. b) Many contradicted the passage. p 80, foot note 22 says starts off by saying "That is not entirely correct..." P126, footnote 4, " I mean rejectors here". If that is what you meant, why waste a footnote. Just say what you mean in the text. c) The average page had 2+ foot notes and I would say that 95% of the foot notes were not used to reference anything but to add to the thought noted on the page which meant that readers had to continuously read the passage then go to the bottom to read the note over and over again.
3) The analogies to the human body were fluff and added no real value. I would say that the book has about 100 pages of real content. Much of the book is repetitive.
4) There is a discussion on decision tables but not decision trees. I have no idea why considering how prominent decision trees are in rule projects.
5) I would have liked to see more material on modeling rules. The book is surprisingly weak here.

2 A primary resource from one of the industry experts
This book is probably the most important of the handful of business rules literature available. Not only is the author is one of the true experts in the field who is a prolific writer of articles on the topic as well as co-developer of related tools, but the book is the most comprehensive work on the nuts and bolts of employing business rules.

The book is divided into five parts, starting with background, definitions and cases in Part I. Concepts and the mechanics of business rules covered in Part II cover the basics in considerable detail, which are built upon in Part III, Best Practices for Expressing Rules. This part is the meat of the book. It starts with a list of dos and don'ts for rule capture and documentation, then introduces "BRS Rulespeak", which is a set of formal rules and approach for identifying, classifying, and expressing business rules. Part IV is a somewhat loose collection of advice for IT professionals (bearing in mind that business rules span both the IT and business domains), and to a minor degree delves into data models, knowledge management and how business rules directly link to business imperatives and processes. Part V digs deeply into formal logic and facts, and is an important part of this book for the practitioner. I especially liked the appendices to this part because they went even deeper into formal methods.

Although I rate this book the highest among the three I own on the subject, if you are only exploring business rules the best place to start before reading this book is Tony Morgan's "Business Rules and Information Systems: Aligning IT with Business Goals"(ISBN 0201743914). Also, Barbara Von Halle's "Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach" (ISBN 0471412937) is a worthwhile resource to be used in conjunction with this book because goes deeper into the practical aspects of implementing business rules as an enterprise initiative.


3 Best Frist Book on Business Rules
This is the place to get started with the business rules approach. I've read several other books on the subject, including Ross's earlier works, and Barbara vanHalle's, but this is the one that brings it all together.

He makes the case much more compellingly for why we need the business rules approach, and then sets up a great framework for understanding how to express and organize the rule base. This is not AI style rules, and he makes it clear what the differences are.

High level assertions are backed up with theoretcial underpinnings. The book is kept easy to read with lots of illustrations and side bars with amusing rules encountered in everyday life.



Sunday, 07-Sep-2008 06:06:33 CDT
Quote of the Day:


After this was written there appeared a remarkable posthumous memoir that

throws some doubt on Millikan's leading role in these experiments. Harvey
Fletcher (1884-1981), who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago,
at Millikan's suggestion worked on the measurement of electronic charge for
his doctoral thesis, and co-authored some of the early papers on this subject
with Millikan. Fletcher left a manuscript with a friend with instructions
that it be published after his death; the manuscript was published in
Physics Today, June 1982, page 43. In it, Fletcher claims that he was the
first to do the experiment with oil drops, was the first to measure charges on
single droplets, and may have been the first to suggest the use of oil.
According to Fletcher, he had expected to be co-authored with Millikan on
the crucial first article announcing the measurement of the electronic
charge, but was talked out of this by Millikan.
-- Steven Weinberg, "The Discovery of Subatomic Particles"

Robert Millikan is generally credited with making the first really
precise measurement of the charge on an electron and was awarded the
Nobel Prize in 1923.

The universe is all a spin-off of the Big Bang.