must have for a "real" developer

You deliver a product. Soon an e-mail arrives - its crashed. "The register are .., the stack (and values) is .., the process address space is partitioned as follows (with values) .., the OS is ...". Now get real !! This book will give you the full info on how to get all that info from a crash (ie. to **write your own "core" dump**), and the user can send it to you - then you can hopefully backtrack to its origin. It gives you all the necessary info on assembly language (the book is worth getting just for this), but also the deep knowledge needed to track down almost any bugs - this is because it **actually shows you how to write a debugger**, and this imparts to you the "deep" info you need to know. Normal debugger usage is covered, but I regard this as trivial compared to the rest of the book. Compared to McKay's book, it is much deeper and goes into the "dirty stuff" that a "real" application programmer would need. An earlier review stated "why would anyone want to know how debuggers work"; all I can say is that anyone who thinks like this should not get this book (and should not be coding either). Oh yes, I am sorry to say I am also not going to give any petty criticism about something missing off the CD. But I will say that .COD files should have been mentioned. You can get these by setting the listing option on the VC++ project/options/C++ tab to source/assembly/machine_code - these are indispensable (with or without a .PDB - look at them and you will know why), but this is forgivable considering how good this book is. Get McKays book as well - it is still a very good book but the focus is at a higher level.

Other Reviews

• One of the best programming books i've read.
• Out of Print !(Huge Shame)
• Excellent Choice Among Windows Debugging Books
• must have for a "real" developer
• This book is excellent!