This is the twelfth volume in the rapidly expanding Springer Practitioner Series, and the third authored or co-.authored by John Hunt, the others being Key java (with A. McManus) and java for Practitioners. As with all John Hunt's books, this book is written in a clear, concise, comprehensible style. The demands on software development continue to exceed satisfactory delivery. There are many expensive failed systems. On the other hand, our capability to develop software is improving, and this book addresses one of a family of approaches, namely the Unified Process, the Unified Modeling Language and Object-Oriented Design. Java is the exemplar language used to illustrate the text, but the lessons to be learned are language-independent. Object-oriented analysis and design have been with us for some time, and have held out many promises of better reusable software. A variety of attempts at deriving a method of applying object-oriented analysis and design eventually culminated in the Unified Modeling Language {UML), which is a unifying notation that should act as a common vocabulary for all object-oriented design projects. The Unified Process is a design framework which guides the tasks, people and products of the design process using UML. Object-oriented analysis and design, UMLand the Unified Process are rapidly gaining popularity and success in software development.