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Debug It!--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf: Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code

November 19, 2009

Raleigh, NC—Three things are certain: Death. Taxes. Debugging. For those first two you're own your own, but if you're a programmer, we can help you handle the third.

Author Paul Butcher says, "Debugging is one of the few completely unavoidable software development tasks. It's a certainty that at some point, you're going to have to write code and at some other point (possibly very soon after the first!) you're going to have to debug it."

Paul's new book, Debug It! (Pragmatic Bookshelf, $34.95 USD), will equip you with the tools, techniques and approaches to ensure that you can tackle any bug with confidence.

These secrets of professional debugging will show you how to handle every stage of the bug life-cycle, from constructing software that makes debugging easy, through detection, reproduction, diagnosis and rolling out your eventual fix.

Whether you're writing Java or assembly language, targeting servers or embedded micro-controllers, using agile or traditional approaches, the same basic bug-fixing principles apply.

With Debug It!, you will:

  • Learn an empirical approach which leverages your software's unique ability to show you what's really happening
  • Discover the importance of finding a reliable and convenient means of reproducing a bug
  • Find out how to avoid common pitfalls
  • See how to use commonly available tools to automatically detect problems before they're reported by customers
  • Construct "self-debugging" software that automatically provides access to crucial information, and identifies the broken assumptions that lead to bugs

You can continue to just wing it, or you could start a professional approach to debugging today. Debug It! will show you how.

For a review copy or more information please email pragprogpr@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

Paul Butcher started out writing games for 8-bit home computers before he was a teenager, and since then has worked in diverse fields at all levels of abstraction, from microcode on bit-slice processors to high-level declarative programming and all points in between.

Additional Resources
For more information about the book, including errata, discussions, full table of contents, excerpts from the book and more, see the catalog page for Debug It!.

Debug It!
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Paul Butcher
ISBN: 9781934356289, 232 pages,
Book Price: $34.95 USD, £26.99 GBP
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000


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