Bruce SilverDMN Method and Style. 2nd Edition: A Business Pracitioner's Guide to Decision Modeling

Must read to all DMN and other modelling developers and analysts.

The first edition of this book was for me the best and most accessible reference to learn the DMN standard and what got me started, but this second edition blows that previous edition out of the water. Bruce clearly used all his experience in teaching and mentoring business users to write a completely new book that has little resemblance with the previous version. The content flow is easier to follow, the text is more objective, and the examples really help to clarify the concepts. Bruce also updated the content of the book to the latest version of the spec (DMN 1.2) and included advice based on his experience working with the standard over the last few years. This is currently the best book on the standard, and the book I recommend to everyone that wants to learn it.

The first version of this book was way ahead of the pack in terms of accessibility and ease of applying to your own modelling. With the second version he's consolidated it to a true method and style manual in the manner of his BPMN works - the first version of this book gave faithful acknowledgment to all of the contributors in the decision modelling space and how that helped in its creation. Now it stands on its own.As with all of Bruce's writing, the style of the book makes it the most accessible offering on the market and he covers all aspects of DMN with remarkable depth despite it's relatively slight volume. There's a lot of detail about FEEL, which any serious modeller should really be considering to really exploit what DMN can do and as a result there's a fair balance struck between decision tables and the other types of boxed expressions in the specification. Boxed contexts have never looked so good!Personally I'd liked to have seen a couple of examples towards the end regarding list membership and set operations because I think there'll be a lot of modelling going on using those techniques, particularly anyone that might be reverse engineering models from SQL, but there's a limit to how much detail can go into one book that aims to cover everything. That said, if you couple this with the DMN Cookbook, you're not going to need anything else to really get to grips with the standard.

This book takes a great approach for start modeling and analyzing decisions, decision requirement diagrams and then goes deep into creating functional boxed expressions with best practices and methodologies to understand DMN in a practical way and get you in an experienced level to solve DMN business needs. I feel prepared for DMN Projects after reading this book, and I don't think there is other like it.

Great book. Explains DMN concepts one by one. Every time with simple, practical examples. A pleasure to read. Highly recommended.

Damage