The Developer's Guide to Debugging

Software has bugs. Period. That's true, unfortunately. Even the good old "hello, world" program, known to virtually every C and C++ programmer in the world, can be considered to be buggy. Developing software means having to deal with defects; old ones, new ones, ones you created yourself, and those that others brought to life. Software developers debug programs for a living. Hence, good debugging skills are a must-have. That said, it is regrettable that debugging is hardly taught in engineering schools. That's how the idea for this book was born. The Developer's Guide to Debugging is a book for both professional software developers seeking to broaden their skills and students that want to learn the tricks of the trade from the ground up. With small examples and exercises it is well suited to accompany a CS course or lecture. At the same time it can be used as a reference guide to address problems as the need arises. This book goes beyond the level of simple source code debugging scenarios. In addition, it covers the most frequent real-world problems from the areas of program linking, memory access, parallel processing and performance analysis. The picture is completed by chapters covering static checkers and techniques to write code that leans well towards debugging. While the focus lies on C and C++, the workhorses of the software industry, one can apply many techniques described in The Developer's Guide to Debugging to programs written in other languages.