Book review: Effective Debugging – 66 Specific Ways to Debug Software and Systems by Diomidis Spinellis

Target audience: developers
Effective Debugging Cover

Philipp’s comment: Effective Debugging contains 66 recipes that show you how to track, find and fix bugs with less headaches. The recipes are neatly grouped into chapters. Every recipe has a Things to Remember section at the end which wraps up the described technique.
Some of the recipes are very basic and should be in every developer’s arsenal; at least after having read the book. Some recipes are meant for the hard to crack cases while some may seem very obvious. I like the completeness of Diomidis Spinellis’ approach. It reminds us that successful debugging starts with mastering the basics. If you’re already familiar with a technique, you can always jump ahead to the Things to Remember section and continue with the next technique.

If you’re a .NET developer like me, you will appreciate the tooling you get out-of-the-box even more after having read the book. Though for some of the recipes in the book I would like to see a sample for the .NET universe.

To have a more complete list of Debugging Tools in the .NET Universe and insight on how to use them I’m going to post more articles in the next couple of months.

The book is definitely worth a read and serves as a reference for the more advanced, rarely used techniques.
Go grab your copy today and let me know what you think about the book. Which technique did leverage your debugging skills the most?

ISBN-13: 978-0134394794

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Philipp Dolder

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