David Thielen wrote:16 June 2009 – Wow, time flies. This was written 17 years ago and in many ways it describes a very different world from the one we work in today. Java & C# have eliminated entire classes of bugs discussed here. Unit tests have proven themselves to be a very powerful tool. And the debugging tools we have today – wow.

But with all that said, the first two chapters here are, I think, every bit as useful and powerful as they were when first written. I trust you will find what is written in those chapters of help in writing rock solid code. And I welcome any comments on my blog.

Thank you – David Thielen Boulder, CO

David Thielen wrote:Who this book is for

Most developers know that software is inherently buggy. And most developers also, hopefully, want to eliminate these bugs before shipping a product. This book is written for these people.

However, writing code with no major bugs (sorry, we haven't yet reached the point of truely bug-free code yet), is a team effort. It takes the work of more than just the developers. It takes testers, managers, support personel, and many more. And this book is aimed at these people too.

This book is designed to solve a problem - buggy code. Because it is aimed at the problem instead of a specific audience (ie, just developers or just testers), parts of this book may not be interesting to certain audiences. Chapters 3 - 10 are written mainly for developers. Chapters 11 & 12 are written mainly for testers.

Yet the book is written to be read straight through. If you want to develop minimally buggy code, then you have to understand all of the pieces that go into getting there. Developers need to understand the test process. Testers need to understand what the developers will be testing on their own.

Most importantly, the managers and others responsible for insuring that the whole orginazation works need to understand the process. And as important, they need to insure that the process is actually being followed.

Finally, this book is written from the Windows/DOS/PC perspective. While most of the ideas discussed are generic to any computing platform, many of the implementations are specific to the PC. And some of the code is specific not only to the PC, but to specific compilers (stack checking has a tendency to be that way).

If you program on a platform other than the PC, in a language other than c, you will still find this book valuable but you will also find that it leaves a lot more work for you to incorporate the ideas here.