| I’ve always been mystified why so few books are available on debugging. You can buy any number on every other aspect of software engineering such as design, code construction, requirements capture, methodologies... the list is endless. And yet, for some reason, debugging has been almost (not quite but very nearly) ignored by authors and publishers. I hope that this book can help remedy the situation.
If you write code, it’s a certainty that at some point (possibly very soon afterward) you’re going to have to debug it. Debugging is, more than anything else, an intellectual process—it doesn’t take place within a debugger or your code but inside your mind. Reaching an understanding of the root cause of the problem is the cornerstone upon which everything else depends.
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of incredibly talented teams on a wide range of software. I’ve worked at all levels of abstraction from microcode on bit-slice processors through device drivers, embedded code, mainstream desktop software, and web applications. I hope that I can pass along some of the lessons I’ve learned from my colleagues along the way. |