Debugging

chapter

1

Introduction

“At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.”

—SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE

This book tells you how to find out what’s wrong with stuff, quick. It’s short and fun because it has to be—if you’re an engineer, you’re too busy debugging to read anything more than the daily comics. Even if you’re not an engineer, you often come across something that’s broken, and you have to figure out how to fix it.

Now, maybe some of you never need to debug. Maybe you sold your dot.com IPO stock before the company went belly-up and you simply have your people look into the problem. ...