Why Programs Fail

Why Programs Fail, winner of the Jolt Productivity Award, has been freshly updated to bring readers up to speed on all the new methodologies that will help save them, their companies, and consumers a lot of headaches. Find out about bugs in computer programs, how to find them, how to reproduce them, and how to fix them in such a way that they do not occur anymore. This new edition of the first comprehensive book on systematic debugging covers a wide range of tools and techniques ranging from hands-on obervation to fully automated diagnoses, and it includes instructions for building automated debuggers. This discussion is built on a solid theory o how failures occur and how to fix them rather than relying on seat-of-the-pants techniques that are of little help with large software systems or to those learing to program. The fully updated Second Edition includes a new chapter on Learning From Mistakes - how to leverage change and bug databases to learn where earlier errors were and where future ones will be. Cutting-edge approaches to reproduce crashes are explained, new insights on how to report problems are described, and new material on tracking origins is included. All across the book, tools, references, and exercicses have been updated to reflect the state of the art. FEATURES: - The new edition of this award-winning productivity-booster is for any developer who has ever been frustrated by elusive bugs. - Brand new material demonstrated cutting-edge debugging techniques and tools, enabling readers to put the latest time-saving developemnts to work for themselves. - Learn by doing - new exercises and detailed examples focus on emerging tools and environments, including ReCRASH, FindBUGS, and the WHYLINE. Supplemental material is available at www.whyprogasfail.com