The Developer's Guide to Debugging - Softcover

From the reviews:

Thorsten Grötker, 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 ?rst aid that is tried and proven.

When dealing with today’s programs, especially those written in C and C++, we’ll still spend some time on debugging – and that’s where The Developer’s Guide to Debugging provides truly priceless advice.

Saarland University, Spring 2008 - Andreas Zeller

"Grötker and colleagues tell readers how to set up a structured process for debugging, categorize the possible bugs, demonstrate writing programs so that they may be more easily debugged, and examine the various tools available. ... Surely an essential resource for professional programmers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic, professional, and two-year technical program libraries, all levels." (R. P. Sarna, Choice, Vol. 46 (6), February, 2009)

"This is a comprehensive guide to debugging C and C++ programs. ... This is the only book I have seen that not only exhaustively covers C/C++ debugging in most common environments, but also gives one a choice of tools to use for each type of problem. I recommend the book to C developers, or as a reference for instructors of C programming courses." (P. Spoerri, ACM Computing Reviews, January, 2009)

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, I always found it regretable that debugging is hardly taught in engineering schools. Well, it is a tricky subject, and there are no good textbooks. The latter can be helped, I thought. 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 inlined examples and exercises at the end of each chapter it is well suited to accompany a CS course or lecture. At the same time it can be used as a reference used 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 most principles described in "The Developer's Guide to Debugging" to programs written in other languages. The techniques are not restricted to a particular compiler, debugger or operating system. The examples are structured such that they can be reproduced with free open-source software.