Dumps, Bugs and Debugging Forensics

Behold! Thou art holding the divine book on bugs and debugging. If you are staring at this preface in a bookshop, ask not what it is; just buy it, go home and savor each page. The explanation further might cause severe brain concussions, especially, if you are not programming savvy and never before thought that bugs don't just occur in nature but they copulate and live in computers too. I'm not talking about cockroaches nesting in your computer but about programming and hardware bugs. If you think you can withstand brain damage and not babble for the rest of your life, read on. We begin with definitions in layman terms. Dumps: when a software program or code behaves unexpectedly and dies on you, it leaves a legacy behind, a big fecal matter er...I mean...dump; crash dump. When the software application is about to die, operating system scavenges the "crap" out of it and deliver the dump to folks like us to analyze further. Debugging engineers will take this dump, load it into the analyzing tool (debugger) and sweat it out, sometimes for days and nights, to figure what went wrong in the bowels. Bugs: any kind of error or behavioral deviations of the application/program/code/phew! from actual expectations is a bug. Here is a simple experiment to find a bug: try putting finger into the live point of an electrical socket and throw the switch. If you are still alive then it is a bug; Electrical socket is not correctly wired. In the process you may actually leave a dump (definition above). See, it is all making sense now. For a layman, it can't get any clearer than what is explained here. Debugging Forensics: dump analysis techniques to find the root cause for the death of an application. This term appears in the title to catch your attention and hopefully get you to buy the book. Dr. Debugalov: the quintessential human debugger. He can merely look at the color and size of the dump and tell you the root cause. He is the inspiration for this book. Bugs are not just idle creatures to sit in the code; they are dynamic and they grow and multiply with more code and create higher dimensional bugs. They have life. This life of bugs and that of Dr. Debugalov is exploited in this book. This book brings humor to the debugging world and it is the first of its kind (if you know any other we don't believe you. We insist, this book is really the first of its kind). - "Diamonds are forever but bugs are an error." - Narasimha Vedala (circa 2008)