Customer Reviews

Debugging Visual C++ Windows: Choose the Best Debugging Tools/Debug the Entire Software Cycle with Disk

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While this book did offer a few pieces of good information, I was very disappointed overall. Even though the book calls itself "A Tutorial-Based Desktop Reference", very little, if any of the book was in the form of a tutorial.

The first part, which deals with Windows memory issues, did at least have some code samples, but no tutorials. Once he started talking about the Visual C++ debugger and other tools, he just gave brief descriptions without saying why or when you would want to use them.

The information in the book is about the same quantity and quality you can find in Visual C++ help. In fact, after reading one topic, I looked it up in the help and was surprised to find that it said almost exactly the same thing, word-for-word. The author added one or two sentences of his own that didn't give me any useful information.

I was looking forward to the section on third party tools, but I found that it was basically a listing of features with nothing to tell me whether the tools would be worth buying, much less instructions on how to actually use them.

There is some useful information, such as a description of how memory is managed in 32-bit Windows. But the same thing can be found in other books. And most of the rest of the book can probably be found in the Microsoft help files or on the outside of the third party tool packages. The best thing I can say about this book is that it puts all of this together.

The book could have been named: "Debugging Visual C++ for Dummies". It's contents in certain chapters are not detailed enough to actually teach you how to use to the various debugging tools to full potential. Chapters 4(The Visual C++ Debugger) and 5(Additional Debugging Tools) fit the above description. The author does provide some good suggestions to bolster your debugging process, but to be a true tutorial for the "intermediate" programmer, more code examples and actual use of the debugging features is required. Hopefully the next edition will go from an IDG "...Dummies" clone to a "Visual C++ Debugging Bible".

DeMorgan's Laws are misstated and the author compounds the problem by proceeding to erroneously "prove" the newly minted falsehoods.

This is the first book I've found that explains Windows debugging in plain English. And although there are some things I didn't like about the book, it is at least very easy to read and follow.

The book does a good job in explaining the overall debugging environment, beginning with the software design phase. There are plenty of good nuggets of information on this subject-- no project manager should be without this. The book does a very good job of dicussing how to use existing tools to discover bugs, and then how to handle them. For example, there is a information on using the GetLastError() function, which I personally had never used. This gives you a text message for a generic error code, making debugging a lot easier to understand.

Other topics I found useful were how to use the debugging tools that ship with Visual C++, plus those from 3rd. party vendors. I found this very helpful in selecting which tools we should use for our projects. Also, known compiler bugs are covered; I wish the book would have covered more of these, but you can't have everything. I heartily recommend this one.