Darya,
thanks for the welcome to the saloon!
There is (almost) nothing specific about RUP in the book. Most people that people in agile and iterative development would hopefully agree with the practices in the book. You can apply these practices and use for example Scrum. However, we did not want to avoid the fact that Bruce and I have a long background as key drivers of RUP, and now the open source process OpenUP (see
www.eclipse.org/epf). The practices in the book are very consistent with what we have in RUP and OpenUP, but as we clarify in the book, they are also very consistent with thinking in Scrum, XP, Adptive Development, Agile Modeling, etc. In fact, for each practice, we comment on how it relates to other processes, especially XP and Scrum. In some cases we articulate practices not covered by scrum, in other cases we have a different view that XP, but all practices are written process independent.
Regarding your question on whether we describe a lifecycle. Not really. We do cover briefly the 4 phases in Unified Process (Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition), and how they influence various practices, but we do not describe an end-to-end process.
Cheers
/Per