Effective Debugging

Every software developer and IT professional understands the crucial importance of effective debugging. Often, debugging consumes most of a developer’s workday, and mastering the required techniques and skills can take a lifetime. In Effective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis helps experienced programmers accelerate their journey to mastery, by systematically categorizing, explaining, and illustrating the most useful debugging methods, strategies, techniques, and tools. Drawing on more than thirty-five years of experience, Spinellis expands your arsenal of debugging techniques, helping you choose the best approaches for each challenge. He presents vendor-neutral, example-rich advice on general principles, high-level strategies, concrete techniques, high-efficiency tools, creative tricks, and the behavioral traits associated with effective debugging. Spinellis’s 66 expert techniques address every facet of debugging and are illustrated with step-by-step instructions and actual code. He addresses the full spectrum of problems that can arise in modern software systems, especially problems caused by complex interactions among components and services running on hosts scattered around the planet. Whether you’re debugging isolated runtime errors or catastrophic enterprise system failures, this guide will help you get the job done—more quickly, and with less pain. Key features include High-level strategies and methods for addressing diverse software failures Specific techniques to apply when programming, compiling, and running code Better ways to make the most of your debugger General-purpose skills and tools worth investing in Advanced ideas and techniques for escaping dead-ends and the maze of complexity Advice for making programs easier to debug Specialized approaches for debugging multithreaded, asynchronous, and embedded code Bug avoidance through improved software design, construction, and management

When the pressure is on to resolve an elusive software or hardware glitch, what’s needed is a cool head courtesy of a set of rules guaranteed to work on any system, in any circumstance. Written in a frank but engaging style, this book provides simple, foolproof principles guaranteed to help find any bug quickly. Recognized tech expert and author David Agans changes the way you think about debugging, making those pesky problems suddenly much easier to find and fix. Agans identifies nine simple, practical rules that are applicable to any software application or hardware system, which can help detect any bug, no matter how tricky or obscure. Illustrating the rules with real-life bug-detection war stories, Debugging shows you how to: Understand the system: how perceiving the ""roadmap"" can hasten your journey Quit thinking and look: when hands-on investigation can’t be avoided Isolate critical factors: why changing one element at a time can be an essential tool Keep an audit trail: how keeping a record of the debugging process can win the day Whether the system or program you’re working on has been designed wrong, built wrong, or used wrong, Debugging helps you think correctly about bugs, so the problems virtually reveal themselves.

Debugging is crucial to successful software development, but even many experienced programmers find it challenging. Sophisticated debugging tools are available, yet it may be difficult to determine which features are useful in which situations. The Art of Debugging is your guide to making the debugging process more efficient and effective. The Art of Debugging illustrates the use three of the most popular debugging tools on Linux/Unix platforms: GDB, DDD, and Eclipse. The text-command based GDB (the GNU Project Debugger) is included with most distributions. DDD is a popular GUI front end for GDB, while Eclipse provides a complete integrated development environment. In addition to offering specific advice for debugging with each tool, authors Norm Matloff and Pete Salzman cover general strategies for improving the process of finding and fixing coding errors, including how to: –Inspect variables and data structures –Understand segmentation faults and core dumps –Know why your program crashes or throws exceptions –Use features like catchpoints, convenience variables, and artificial arrays –Avoid common debugging pitfalls Real world examples of coding errors help to clarify the authors’ guiding principles, and coverage of complex topics like thread, client-server, GUI, and parallel programming debugging will make you even more proficient. You'll also learn how to prevent errors in the first place with text editors, compilers, error reporting, and static code checkers. Whether you dread the thought of debugging your programs or simply want to improve your current debugging efforts, you'll find a valuable ally in The Art of Debugging.

Writing code is only half the battle in developing applications. Getting the bugs out is the other half - and it can be the frustrating part since, after all, bugs don't just mysteriously appear in your code. You have to put them there. But masterful debugging is more than a skill you can learn, it's a frame of mind, yes, almost a way of life. In "Debugging Visual FoxPro Applications", Nancy Folsom takes you into the head of a successful debugger, gives you a new perspective on the mind set, and then explores the myriad of tools that Visual FoxPro programmers have at their disposal.

"Debugging Techniques: Finding and Fixing Bugs" is a book that provides guidance on identifying and resolving software bugs in computer programs. The book covers a range of techniques and strategies that can be used to debug code, including debugging tools, testing methodologies, and best practices for identifying and isolating bugs. The book is aimed at programmers and software developers of all levels, from beginners to experienced professionals. It covers both the theoretical and practical aspects of debugging, including how to approach different types of bugs, how to use debugging tools effectively, and how to work collaboratively to identify and fix bugs in complex software projects. Overall, "Debugging Techniques: Finding and Fixing Bugs" is a comprehensive guide to the art of debugging that provides readers with the knowledge and skills needed to improve the quality and reliability of their software applications.

The design and development of digital computer software for distributed concurrent programming environments has increased significantly in the past few years. The presence of remote processors and concurrency greatly complicates the creation, analysis, testing, and debugging of all software produced for these environments. It appears that few tools developed for sequential environments are adequate for debugging software programs in a distributed concurrent environment. The distributed concurrent environment also presents the need for special debugging tools that were not needed for sequential environments. This research will present a new model for debugging programs in a distributed concurrent programming environment. This new model was used to design, develop, and implement an integrated, cooperating set of concurrent debugging tools. The new debugging model and tool set were used in a distributed Concurrent C development environment running under the UNIX® operating system and connected by an Ethernet local area network. Actual results obtained from using the new debugging scheme and integrated debugging tool set to detect, locate, and correct software faults in distributed Concurrent C programs are also presented.

This book describes an approach and supporting infrastructure to facilitate debugging the silicon implementation of a System-on-Chip (SOC), allowing its associated product to be introduced into the market more quickly. Readers learn step-by-step the key requirements for debugging a modern, silicon SOC implementation, nine factors that complicate this debugging task, and a new debug approach that addresses these requirements and complicating factors. The authors’ novel communication-centric, scan-based, abstraction-based, run/stop-based (CSAR) debug approach is discussed in detail, showing how it helps to meet debug requirements and address the nine, previously identified factors that complicate debugging silicon implementations of SOCs. The authors also derive the debug infrastructure requirements to support debugging of a silicon implementation of an SOC with their CSAR debug approach. This debug infrastructure consists of a generic on-chip debug architecture, a configurable automated design-for-debug flow to be used during the design of an SOC, and customizable off-chip debugger software. Coverage includes an evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of the CSAR approach and its supporting infrastructure, using six industrial SOCs and an illustrative, example SOC model. The authors also quantify the hardware cost and design effort to support their approach.

The influx of computer technology into classrooms during the past decade raises the questions -- how can we teach children to use computers productively and what effect will learning to program computers have on them? During this same period, researchers have investigated novice learning of computer programming. Teaching and Learning Computer Programming unites papers and perspectives by respected researchers of teaching and learning computer science while it summarizes and integrates major theoretical and empirical contributions. It gives a current and concise account of how instructional techniques affect student learning and how learning of programming affects students' cognitive skills. This collection is an ideal supplementary text for students and a valuable reference for professionals and researchers of education, technology and psychology, computer science, communication, developmental psychology, and industrial organization.