Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code

by Bill Blunden

Book Overview

Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code discusses sociological forces that make it difficult for a programmer to do their job. There are plenty of books that discuss "how-to-debug," but these books fall short by mistaking a symptom for the illness. This book takes an unflinching look at the true behavioral problems in software engineering. The brutally honest approach and accompanying illustrations from the dark ages...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590592344
• ISBN13: 9781590592342
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good coverage of software maintenance, techniques and tools from personal perspective

In his book Bill Blunden covers wide set of software maintenance techniques, tools and methods from his very personal perspective. Now, in year 2010 some of the material seems little outdated but he does provide very deep historic perspective on software development since early days of 1980s. Is is a book about working with the legacy software after all. I think a young developer faced with perspective of supporting an old application will find this book very useful not only for its technical coverage but for practical and even political advise.

Very good, but, Heisenberg is watching over him.

Very good! This is not only an amazing technical book but it's also a politician book about the truth behind the software industry. All I have to say is that you must read it before you even think about rate yourself as a "good" programmer. But like everything in life it has only one big problem. The author states that by using a debugger you run out of "Heisenberg principle" and it's not true! The effect that a debugger has on timing related problems is not trivial. Even made a debug build will change timing. Anyone who had problems with threads once in life, will know how hard is to debug a thread problem with a debugger (or debug build), just because as your program slowdown your threads may work fine and you will never know what's happening to your concurrency management. Debug without change timing only work for single thread process and only those ones that do not take timing on account to work properly. By the way, I must recommend this book; you will find a lot of useful tips & tricks on it!

This one is REALLY good

Don't give this one to your programming team, they probably won't get it. Don't give it to this year's star programmer, for the same reason. Wait until you find that one kid that always has one more answer than everyone else, and especially the one that has one more question than everyone else. Give that kid this book. This book is about all that ugly stuff that people take pride in ignoring because it's "low level" and they're way too cool to do anything low. Memory has costs, CPU cycles have costs, they're wasted in different ways, and recovered in different ways. You find out which is which in different ways. That's what this book is about. Basically, it's all that stuff that was too pragmatic for your CS professors and too theoretical for the Computer Eng. teachers - i.e., what you needed and never got. This book addresses memory usage, stack frames, processor cache, loop fusion and strength reduction, all in down-and-dirty examples. It talks about debuggers, source control, and bug management - the facts of daily business life that coursework rarely addresses. If a junior zoomer masters what this book has in it, s/he might survive one of my favorite interview questions: Given only a C compiler, no assembler, and full compiler documentation, unwind the stack. If you don't know what "unwind" is, go away; if you read this book, we'll talk. //wiredweird

An Inmate's View of Life in an IT Dungeon

Software Exorcism is a mind-dump by an experienced maintenance programmer. Bill Blunden lists all the horrendous coding techniques he's come across in commercial software, while offering detailed tips on debugging and optimizing code. The very useful code examples are written in C++, C or assembly language, mostly on an Intel platform.The aim of the book is to help computer science and engineering students jump the chasm to corporate life by giving them the real-life vocabulary and practices that they can expect to meet over the first few years of their professional life. Much of what they will learn is to forget most of what they've been taught in college -- from terse variable names to an infatuation with recursive routines.Amongst the challenges that Blunden expands upon are the realities of corporate and office politics. Here are all the gory details of the name-and-blame game, information hiding and "Sysyphean" tasks aimed at pressuring people to quit. Ultimately, Blunden concludes, software engineering, as a career path, has become a "quaint anachronism" and programming is "strictly a short-term occupation". If he's right, then it's a pity that this book probably won't be seen by most CS students until they're ready to graduate after paying all that tuition. Also recommended: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass