June 2013
Beginner
448 pages
9h 38m
English
Content preview from Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for SuccessBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 7
The Usual Suspects
Every programmer will eventually face a bug that defies their attempts at fixing it. The bug might seem impossible to reproduce, or it might show up only occasionally on a remote customer's machine. Some bugs are so difficult and time consuming to investigate that living with them can be cheaper than trying to fix them. On the other end of the scale, some bugs are so costly that no option exists but to fix them. Struggling with hard bugs is such an important programming experience that I am skeptical of any programmer who claims to be an expert, but who cannot tell at least one or two bug-fixing horror stories.
Here is one of my horror stories: I was asked to help a team who had been struggling for about a week with an elusive bug. This bug had a particularly high profile because it involved the loss of data in a system that managed the personal information of children and families. The team could not reproduce the problem despite daily reports of data loss.
Compounding the difficulty, the support team was given access to the problematic customer database for only a few hours daily and only after obtaining written authorization from the client each day. There was also uncertainty about which version of the database was being used by the customer. All the stored procedures, functions, and views in the database (hundreds of them) were encrypted and the database had no proper version information so the support team was forced to guess or experiment to ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.