Mini-review: No Bugs!

Hi,

My book-reading binge continues, this time with yet another book by a Microsoft developer. No Bugs! is written by David Thielen, a senior engineer at Microsoft and a columnist for various computer magazines.

This book's subject is `delivering error-free code in C and C++'. It's targeted very much at PC programmers, and substantial parts of it are irrelevant to our work. The focus is mostly on 'tricks' to catch bugs, and while they're generally good ideas, the depth of coverage and the underlying philosophy are much weaker than Writing Solid Code, which I described recently. If you only read one of these books, read Writing Solid Code instead.

On the other hand, it doesn't take long to skim this book, 166 pages plus appendices, and I think my time was well spent. The chapter on testing and beta testing at the end was a readable overview of that subject, though not immediately relevant to our own cicumstances.

David

David Price, TMS-OS