Find the Bug
Author: Adam Barr
Publisher: Addison Wesley, 2004
Price: £26.99
Pages: 306
ISBN: 978-0321223913
Aimed at: Experienced programmers
Rating: 4
Pros: Could be seen as fun
Cons: There are too many bugs in the world to want to add to them on purpose.
Reviewed by: Harry Fairhead

This is a book that contains bugs in programs and your challenge is to find them. It aims to sensitise developers to the problems and indicate the sorts of approaches that can successfully solve them.

Author: Adam Barr
Publisher: Addison Wesley, 2004
Price: £26.99
Pages: 306
ISBN: 0321223918
Aimed at: Experienced programmers
Rating: 4
Pros: Could be seen as fun
Cons: There are too many bugs in the world to want to add to them on purpose.
Reviewed by: Harry Fairhead

This is a book that contains bugs in programs and your challenge is to find them. What can I say?

The world is full of enough bugs without needing tame caged examples for us to experiment on! Much of the early part of the book is fun to read and full of what should be obvious stuff to any practicing serious programmer – give variables sensible names, make sure functions do what they claim and don't have side effects, watch out for variable that have a restricted range. If some of this isn't familiar to you then it should be and you probably need to read this book. Even if it is familiar there is a warm glow to be gained from reading it again and shaking your head knowingly.

The latter part of the book is more radical. It consists of example programs in C, Java, Python, Perl, and 86x assembly language complete with bugs. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to find the bugs. How useful this is depends on your approach to the whole programming problem. It's almost a matter of psychology. What is clear is that this book is too short and ephemeral to actually be successful in training you to be better at debugging. The best it can do is to sensitise you the nature of the problem and the sorts of approaches – logic, logic and more logic – that tend to be successful. In truth a good bug finder is either born or serves a much longer apprenticeship at the hands of a master than this book can offer. A good fun read that might reveal the truth to those ready to receive.

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Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software 2nd Ed

Top Book 2023
Author: Charles Petzold
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Date: August 2022
Pages: 480
ISBN: 978-0137909100
Print: 0137909101
Kindle: B0B123P5GV
Audience: General
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Mike James
Code! We all need to know about it.



Computer Concepts And Management Information Systems

Author:  C.P Gupta and K. K. Goyal
Publisher: Mercury Learning
Pages: 250
ISBN:978-1683925866
Print:1683925866
Kindle: B08CVSHKG3
Audience: General
Rating: 3
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This book is an introduction to the basics of what a computer is, what software is, and what management information syste [ ... ]


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Last Updated ( Friday, 19 March 2010 )