February 1999
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
9h 18m
English
Content preview from The Practice of ProgrammingBecome 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,
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Chapter 6: Testing
In ordinary computational practice by hand or by desk machines, it is the custom to check every step of the computation and, when an error is found, to localize it by a backward process starting from the first point where the error is noted.
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
Testing and debugging are often spoken as a single phrase but they are not the same thing. To over-simplify, debugging is what you do when you know that a program is broken. Testing is a determined, systematic attempt to break a program that you think is working.
Edsger Dijkstra made the famous observation that testing can demonstrate the presence of bugs, but not their absence. His hope is that programs can be made correct by construction, so that there are ...
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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.