The.Developers.Guide.to.Debugging.rar

Of all activities in software development, debugging is probably the one that is hated most. It is guilt-ridden because a technical failure suggests personal failure; because it points the finger at us showing us that we have been wrong. It is time-consuming because we have to rethink every single assumption, every single step from requirements to implementation. Its worst feature though may be that it is unpredictable: You never know how much time it will take you to fix a bug - and whether you’ll be able to fix it at all. Ask a developer for the worst moments in life, and many of them will be related to debugging. It may be 11pm, you’re still working on it, you are just stepping through the program, and that’s when your spouse calls you and asks you when you’ll finally, finally get home, and you try to end the call as soon as possible as you’re losing grip on the carefully memorized observations and deductions. In such moments, you may eventually be choosing between restarting your debugging task or restarting your relationship. My personal estimate is that debugging is the number one cause for programmer’s divorces. And yet, debugging can be a joy, as much thrill as solving puzzles, riddles, or murder mysteries – if you proceed in a systematic way and if you are equipped with the right tools for the job. This is where The Developer’s Guide to Debugging comes into play. Thorsten Gr¨otker, Ulrich Holtmann, Holger Keding, and Markus Wloka speak directly to the entrenched developer, give straight-forward advice on solving debugging problems and come up with solutions real fast. Whether it is solving memory problems, debugging parallel programs, or dealing with problems induced by your very tool chain - this book offers first aid that is tried and proven. I would have loved to have such a book at the beginning of my debugging career – I would have gazed at it in amazement of what these debugging tools can do for me, and by following its advice, I could have saved countless hours of manual debugging – time I could have spent on other activities. For instance, I could have made my code more reliable such that in the end, I would not have had to do any debugging at all.