Chapter 1

Dealing with Bugs

In This Chapter

arrow Distinguishing bugs from features

arrow Anticipating every move the user makes

arrow Avoiding mistakes the easy way

arrow Dealing with errors

Who knows whether it’s true, but as the story goes, back when the first computer was built over a half-century ago, it filled an entire room with circuitry (yet was about as powerful as one of those inexpensive calculators — the kind that perform only basic math). One day, the thing was misbehaving, and some brave engineers climbed deep into the thing. (The version we’re thinking of has them wearing white radiation suits, of course.) Deep in The Bowels of the Machine (sounds like a movie title), they found none other than … an insect! A bug! It was a great big bug that had gotten messed up in the circuitry, causing the computer to malfunction. So the story goes, anyway. Today, we use the term bug to mean something that is wrong with an application. In this minibook, we show you how to track down bugs and fix them in your software. In this chapter, we talk about what exactly a bug is (and is not!), how bugs occur, ...

Get C++ All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.