Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J. Agans

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(Paperback)

  • Pub. Date: October 2002
  • 832pp

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    Product Details

    • Pub. Date: October 2002
    • Publisher: AMACOM
    • Format: Paperback, 832pp

    Synopsis

    Agans (a consultant) offers a universal guide to finding, diagnosing, and solving problems. The nine problem-solving rules in this book apply to any system, regardless of its language, application areas, hardware, or software. Chapters provide an overview of the approach, explain each rule and its application, provide a few thought experiments, and describe the limits of tech support. Flow charts, diagrams, "war stories," and quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle illustrate key points. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

    Test & Measurement World

    get this book. Its stories and examples are amusing and instructive. If you master the rules, writes Agans, you can be a hero, or at least leave work on time and get a good night's sleep.

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    Customer Reviews

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    Belongs on every programmer's bookshelfby Anonymous

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    December 01, 2002: David Agans does a great job of explaining how to approach debugging as a science rather than an art. If you're a novice programmer, you'll find a wealth of distilled knowledge here that would take many years to acquire on your own. While experienced programmers may consider most of the rules to be obvious, that doesn't mean they're common practice. I've been debugging for more than 20 years, and still learnt some useful new tricks. Rule 3 ("Quit thinking and look") is a particularly good one to keep in mind. Peppered throughout the text are a large number of war stories from the author's own experience with embedded systems. As well as illustrating how to (and more commonly, how not to) approach a particular problem, these are all well written and often entertaining. Some of my favourites: how wearing the wrong shirt to work caused a new video compression chip to crash; a vacuum cleaner that made the house lights flash on and off; a noisy read/write line that led a junior engineer to mistakenly redesign an entire co-processor memory circuit; the well pump that wasn't broken; and the self-test feature on an old Pong video game. Although most examples are hardware related, the approach described can be applied to almost any problem; indeed, several of the examples used have nothing to do with computing. This is not a large book, but it's well laid out, easy to follow, and doesn't talk down to the reader. It's also packed with enough meat to satisfy the hungriest of programmers. Highly recommended.