book: Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code (Expert's Voice) | Reverend Bill Blunden
 
 


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Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code (Expert's Voice)
Reverend Bill Blunden

Apress, 2003 - 376 pages

average customer review:based on 2 reviews
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An Inmate's View of Life in an IT Dungeon

Software Exorcism is a mind-dump by an experienced maintenance programmer. Bill Blunden lists all the horrendous coding techniques he's come across in commercial software, while offering detailed tips on debugging and optimizing code. The very useful code examples are written in C++, C or assembly language, mostly on an Intel platform.

The aim of the book is to help computer science and engineering students jump the chasm to corporate life by giving them the real-life vocabulary and practices that they can expect to meet over the first few years of their professional life. Much of what they will learn is to forget most of what they've been taught in college -- from terse variable names to an infatuation with recursive routines.

Amongst the challenges that Blunden expands upon are the realities of corporate and office politics. Here are all the gory details of the name-and-blame game, information hiding and "Sysyphean" tasks aimed at pressuring people to quit.

Ultimately, Blunden concludes, software engineering, as a career path, has become a "quaint anachronism" and programming is "strictly a short-term occupation". If he's right, then it's a pity that this book probably won't be seen by most CS students until they're ready to graduate after paying all that tuition.

Also recommended: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass


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This one is REALLY good

Don't give this one to your programming team, they probably won't get it. Don't give it to this year's star programmer, for the same reason. Wait until you find that one kid that always has one more answer than everyone else, and especially the one that has one more question than everyone else. Give that kid this book.

This book is about all that ugly stuff that people take pride in ignoring because it's "low level" and they're way too cool to do anything low. Memory has costs, CPU cycles have costs, they're wasted in different ways, and recovered in different ways. You find out which is which in different ways. That's what this book is about. Basically, it's all that stuff that was too pragmatic for your CS professors and too theoretical for the Computer Eng. teachers - i.e., what you needed and never got.

This book addresses memory usage, stack frames, processor cache, loop fusion and strength reduction, all in down-and-dirty examples. It talks about debuggers, source control, and bug management - the facts of daily business life that coursework rarely addresses.

If a junior zoomer masters what this book has in it, s/he might survive one of my favorite interview questions: Given only a C compiler, no assembler, and full compiler documentation, unwind the stack. If you don't know what "unwind" is, go away; if you read this book, we'll talk.

//wiredweird


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YOU HAVE TO OWN THIS BOOK!

Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code takes an unflinching, no bulls$&# look at behavioral problems in the software engineering industry, shedding much-needed light on the social forces that make it difficult for programmers to do their job. Do you have a co-worker who perpetually writes bad code that you are forced to clean up? This is your book. While there are plenty of books on the market that cover debugging and short-term workarounds for bad code, Reverend Bill Blunden takes a revolutionary step beyond them by bringing our attention to the underlying illnesses that plague the software industry as a whole.

Further, Software Exorcism discusses tools and techniques for effective and aggressive debugging, gives optimization strategies that appeal to all levels of programmers, and presents in-depth treatments of technical issues with honest assessments that are not biased toward proprietary solutions.

Slashdot says . . .

"Leave it to a SubGenius preacher to take normally mundane subjects, like software maintenance, and expose the unholy conspiracy behind them. I think the following quote from the introduction sums up the tone of the book nicely: 'Rather than shield your eyes from the sordid realities of the software industry, I am going to dust off my old 8mm films and let you take a good look at the uncensored truth for yourself. You may want to keep a paper bag handy in case you get sick.'"

Click to read the whole Slashdot review.

Readers are saying . . .

"Okay, I've worked with every moron in the book . . . was this [book] written about the guy who sits in the cube next to me?"
Dan, VSLive 2003 Orlando attendee

"And I thought that I was the only person to ever actually throw my laptop across the room at a fellow coder."
Anonymous, Microsoft PDC, Los Angeles


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