The title "Modeling Software with Finite State Machines", and the accompanying web-site [...], proclaim a new and fabulous way to design, develop and implement software-solutions. This method, so the authors state, will bring the engineering back into software development.



To my mind, those statements are ludicrous, very biased and uninformed and so it made it really very hard for me to read the book. The tendentious style penetrates pretty much the entire first third of the book. As however I needed a good overview of practical use of state-machine (for a non-hardware problem), I persevered.



Chapters 4, 8 and 9 gave me what I needed, though again the material is presented in a pseudo-academic, know-it-all style. The academic material on Finite Automata I have read tends to be pretty impractical, whilst this book takes a practical approach and as I get the impression, that the authors are experienced in their fields, that was good enough for me.



The last third of the book (Chapters 10 to 17), focus on StateWorks. As I do not intend to buy that product, this gave me little information I could use.