It is an old saw that you can’t tell a book by its cover; it is equally true that often you cannot tell what a book will contain simply from its title. By its title, this book might promise a wide-ranging survey of how the visual is used in person-to-person (computer-mediated) communication, or indeed person-to-computer communication. This is not the case; rather, the book presents a survey of diagrammatic visual programming languages (VPLs), and a portfolio of case studies illustrating the theoretical work.

Visual programming involves writing programs whose two (or higher) dimensional properties are significant in expressing the program’s structure. Diagrammatic visual programming is based on diagrams that provide a graphical view of the relationships between objects, for example Petri nets and flowchart languages, as well as modeling languages such as unified modeling language (UML).

Graphical structures are represented in a context-sensitive way using reserved graph grammars (RGGs), developed by the author to provide a more compact representation of graphical structures than traditional layered graph grammars. Chapter 2 covers the theory of RGGs, including graph generation and the representation of graph rewriting rules; this is complemented by chapter 3, which examines the spatial aspects of graphs, and how to parse them in an efficient way.

The bulk of the text covers a series of examples that show RGGs in action, including adaptive multimedia presentation; modeling Extensible Markup Language (XML) representation and transformation, using RGGs at both the object and meta levels; visual programming in software architecture; and graphical approaches to the construction of Web sites. This series of examples concludes with VisPro, an environment for the design of visual programming languages. The text concludes with speculations about the future of visual programming, including adding a temporal dimension to VPLs, and the induction of the grammar rules of VPLs.

This book presents a thorough survey of the author’s approach to diagrammatic visual programming languages, augmented by a comprehensive set of case studies of the approach in practice. It will serve as a thorough introduction to this work, even if it perhaps fails to live up to the promise of its title.