Not as helpful as it could be | The Science of Debugging

book: The Science of Debugging | Yuan Hsieh, Matthew Telles

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	• The Science of Debugging Yuan Hsieh, Matthew Telles Paraglyph Press, 2002 - 512 pages view larger image
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Rich with wisdom

I admit that I bought this book fully expecting to be
"underwhelmed." Instead, I was pleasantly surprised as
to how much this work had to offer.

They begin the book with this interesting premise:
"One of the groups that is likely to discount this book is
the system architects camp, although they are the
ones that are most likely to be aided by understanding the
root causes of bugs and how they can be avoided." After
reading this (which appeared on page 6) I decided to mark

each page that contained an important architectural-level
observation or recommendation. By the end of the book,
I had nearly 40 such pages identified!

The work is well researched with good references and
footnotes. It is also rich with real-world examples of
horror stories and debugging nightmares. I found myself
filling the margins with recollections of my own, similar
experiences.

The book is not without faults. There seems to be a great
deal of repetition and there were several points where I
wished the book had been more carefully edited. I didn't
agree with everything presented and I think they actually
got a couple of things completely wrong. Finally,
there is at least one puzzle presented where the authors
challenge you to "find the bug" where even their answer
wasn't complete! [See page 307--an exercise for the reader.]

The author's aim was to discuss debugging but the book
contained as many Software Engineering observations as
general debugging tips. I believe that these general
observations and recommendations strengthen the work
considerably.

Any college course in Software Engineering would benefit
by including this book as required reading. Any project
lead organizing a new product development effort should
take an hour and skim though this book again (after
an initial, careful reading). Finally, any programmer
who wishes to build for debug-ability would do well to
review this work.

The book's one sentence synopsis comes directly from the
authors (page 109) "One of the most critical (and most
overlooked) aspects of debugging is to understand why
bugs occur and where they come from." I agree. This
book does a marvelous job to address that and much more.
I highly recommend it.

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Not as helpful as it could be

In reading the book, there were many great platform idependant ideas for debugging applications. I think it would have been more helpful if the book would have at least cursorily implemented some of those ideas in code (my preference being C/C++). Some examples of what I mean are it says that one of the oldest ways of debugging applications use a log. It even goes to say what elements to include to make it as useful as possible. I think it would have been better to include the code implementing a logger they describe.

This book, written by two master programmers, is the bible on debugging software. It goes much further than other debugging books by offering practical tips on minimizing bugs and making them easier to find when they do occur. It includes chapters on testing and maintenance as they relate to debugging. The book describes the nature of bugs, how they slip through testing, and the things various bugs have in common. These discussions are supported by case studies of famous and not-so-famous bugs and industrial/academic research and experiments. Each chapter concludes with a "bug problem" and answers to these problems are provided in the last chapter. Above all, this is a book written by developers who've spent years tracking down bugs and offers practical, hands-on advice to make that task more predictable.

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