Customer Reviews

Advanced Debugging Methods (The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science)

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I'm disappointed because the book doesn't live up to it's description / summary. It's rare enough that you won't find it in a store to browse, though, so I'll tell you a bit about it.

We're basically looking at a Ph.D dissertation here. That is, the book has one single central "advanced debugging" idea that it explores and explains the author's implementation of. The summary made it sound like there'd be a bunch of wild ideas in here for advanced debugging tools, not just one!

The idea is to have a query language built into the debugger than the developer can use to assert invarients of some sort. So, in the query language, it could say that "all people have ages > 0 and <= 140", or something like that. And then the book goes on to talk about how the implementation only re-runs the relevant parts of the query when someone updates the 'age' field.

It was published in 2000, too - so there is some out-of-date information in there about the available java debug API's.

To be fair, the second chapter (12 pages) does summarize some advanced debugging techniques (with references), such as Program slicing, method animation, and data structure display.

So, in summary, then:

If you read the summary and think you're getting a book of ideas, you're not. Don't bother.

If you've taken it upon yourself to write a query based debugger and my description above wasn't enough to clue you in to the obvious optimizations, then go ahead and buy the book, it's mostly discussion of the implementation and usefulness of this tool.

Otherwise, have a browse through it if you happen to come across it in a bookstore (ha!). But I wouldn't recommend it's purchase - there aren't any any earth shattering revelations in there.