Software Exorcism

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.

This is a special title that will be both technically useful and visually stimulating to the reader.

An industry insider explains why there is so much bad software—and why academia doesn't teach programmers what industry wants them to know. Why is software so prone to bugs? So vulnerable to viruses? Why are software products so often delayed, or even canceled? Is software development really hard, or are software developers just not that good at it? In The Problem with Software, Adam Barr examines the proliferation of bad software, explains what causes it, and offers some suggestions on how to improve the situation. For one thing, Barr points out, academia doesn't teach programmers what they actually need to know to do their jobs: how to work in a team to create code that works reliably and can be maintained by somebody other than the original authors. As the size and complexity of commercial software have grown, the gap between academic computer science and industry has widened. It's an open secret that there is little engineering in software engineering, which continues to rely not on codified scientific knowledge but on intuition and experience. Barr, who worked as a programmer for more than twenty years, describes how the industry has evolved, from the era of mainframes and Fortran to today's embrace of the cloud. He explains bugs and why software has so many of them, and why today's interconnected computers offer fertile ground for viruses and worms. The difference between good and bad software can be a single line of code, and Barr includes code to illustrate the consequences of seemingly inconsequential choices by programmers. Looking to the future, Barr writes that the best prospect for improving software engineering is the move to the cloud. When software is a service and not a product, companies will have more incentive to make it good rather than “good enough to ship."

Covers important concepts, issues, trends, methodologies, and technologies in quality assurance for model-driven software development.

Why software isn’t perfect, as seen through the stories of software developers at a run-of-the-mill tech company Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In Middle Tech, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings. The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird. Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result, they don’t feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good enoughness.

This book presents four keynote speeches, eight invited papers and over a hundred papers selected from 180 submissions from more than 25 countries around the world. The contributions investigate applications of computational intelligence and multimedia in various areas, such as artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, pattern recognition, evolutionary computations, logic synthesis, fuzzy logic, image processing, image retrieval, virtual reality, etc.

* Includes a complete QuickBasic compiler with source code. We cannot overstress that this is a huge marketing hook. Virtually every experienced programmer today started out with some version of Basic or QuickBasic and has at some point in their career wondered how it worked. The sheer nostalgia alone will generate sales. The idea of having QuickBasic for them to play with (or let their kids play with) will generate sales. * One of a kind book – nothing else comes close to this book. * Demystifies compiler technology for ordinary programmers – this is a subject usually covered by academic books in a manner too advanced for most developers. This book is pitched at a level accessible to all but beginners. * Teaches skills used in many other types of programming from creation of macro/scripting languages to file parsing.