Product Description
&> — Bob Wilton, Escalation Engineer, Critical Problem Resolution Team, Microsoft “An excellent reference for both intermediate and advanced debuggers: highly practical, and filled with tricks and strategies. This book stands out from all other Win32 debugging literature, thanks to its in-depth examples–including resolving intricate problems like stack and heap corruptions.” — Kinshuman, Development Lead, Windows Core OS Division, Microsoft The First… More >>
#1 by M. Sharkansky on February 3, 2010 - 8:26 am
It is expensive, promises a lot and delivers next to nothing. The author concentrates of some specific problems, explains them in uninteligeble language, assuming that you already know all these Windows undocumented internals. I tried to find a problem in thread management with the help of this book and it was a waste of time. The application verifier is another product that most of the time crashes the computer and when it does not, it slows it to zero speed. Probably, one can pick in this book an explanation or two, but I would not count on it too much.
Rating: 3 / 5
#2 by J. S. Hardman on February 3, 2010 - 9:17 am
I’ve been developing applications on Windows since LONG before the days of 32 bit Windows (let alone 64 bit) and pre-emptive multi-threading. Over all those years I’m glad to say I’ve never had need for the information in this book – until now… Having been doing some consultancy for a company with many applications that exhibit all sorts of faults on company sites, it became necessary to find out more about debugging Windows applications outside of a development or test environment.
I’ve always made a point of building applications on the highest compiler warning level, passing the source code through PC-Lint, executing the code under BoundsChecker, Purify, Quantify, Pure Coverage, doing lots of unit testing, system testing etc. More recently I’ve added further tools to that list such as Intel’s ThreadChecker. I have always hoped that everybody did many, if not most/all of those things. Apparently not. The number of issues, the “knottiness” of the code and the added difficulty of having to work out the cause of problems from log files etc coming back from client sites has been a revelation. And that is where this book comes in. I’m not going to claim to have read it cover to cover, but almost every page that I have read has contained information that I hadn’t come across before and that is after a lot of years of Windows development. Similarly, this stuff is new to the rest of the team too.
So, if you are up to your neck in defect reports, dump files etc and you don’t have the option of re-writing the code, then this is the book that you need. It’s not a gripping read (as you may have guessed from the book’s full title), but boy does it contain a lot of useful material.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Tushar Jadhav on February 3, 2010 - 9:39 am
I’m new to debugging, this book gave me some insight that would have taken me years to learn. The authors have bagged thier experience and packaged it in this book. I was able to solve a complex problem within a day. Must have book for developers and system administrators.
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by M. Johnson on February 3, 2010 - 11:45 am
This book provides excellent coverage of the subject. I found it to be accurate and to contain the details I needed.
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by t9k on February 3, 2010 - 1:44 pm
The focus is on debugging using tools other than Visual Studio. There is still a lot of useful information about other tools, but if you want to learn how to debug with the Visual Studio debugger, this is not the book to get.
Rating: 5 / 5