Ag02 Agans, D. Debugging. Amacom, 2002.

The book contains 175 pages of general techniques for diagnosing prob-lems, which can be applied to both hardware and software problems. The index is seven pages long; the book contains no bibliography, appendices, or collateral software. This book suggests nine general principles for trou-bleshooting and debugging. The author presents 45 personal experience anecdotes to motivate readers and illustrate his principles. Most of these are related to debugging electronic hardware or low-level system software.

The most helpful feature of this book is the chapter that contains four extended personal experience anecdotes and explanations of how the nine principles were applied in these situations. The summaries at the end of the chapters are also helpful.

Al02 Allen, E. Bug Patterns in Java. APress, 2002.

The book contains 7 pages of language- and platform-independent debug-ging information, 141 pages of language-dependent debugging informa-tion, and 52 pages related to other phases of the software-development process. The bibliography contains 35 URLs for Web pages and 16 anno-tated book references. The index is 10 pages long; there are 14 pages of appendices, and there is no collateral software. The core of the book is the presentation of 14 bug patterns, one per chapter. The focus of these chap-ters is to explain the causes and prevention of these bug types, rather than the diagnosis of the bugs.

The most helpful parts of the book are (1) a table of 6 pages that pro-vides an alphabetical list of 120...