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Writing Solid Code: Microsoft's Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs (Microsoft...
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by Steve Maguire
Sales Rank: 186895
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$0.64
At Amazon
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition May 1993
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1556155514
ISBN-13: 978-1556155512
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
Product Review
Any programmer worth their silicon knows that it is wiser to invest time preventing bugs from hatching than to try to exterminate them afterwards. And this is one of the best books for developing a proactive attitude towards electronic entomology. Follow Maguire's advice, and your testers, supervisors and customers will love you. Recommended.
Book Description
"This book has useful things to say and an engaging way of saying thema worthwhile addition to the shelves of any full-time programmer." - PC Week. Here, from a former Microsoft developer, are super secrets for developing bug-free C programs. Maguire provides examples of how bugs are caught at Microsoft (using actual case histories) and shows how readers can use these proven programming techniques to get products to market faster.
Customer Reviews & Comments
Writing Solid Code was first published over eight years ago and concerns a subject, development in C, that hasn't gotten much press lately. In an era where it seems like everything is OO and developed in C++ or Java, the simple truth is C and non-OO development still has a strong place in our industry. This may explain why a book such as this continues to draw attention. The writing has a feel of the old C classics such as The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan, Plauger) which also offered lots of advice with little or no formal reasoning or literature citations to back up that advice. As a consequence, the text has a personal, easy flow but contains some recommendations which are questionable at best. First, I should outline what is right with this work. There are many nuggets of wisdom that seem obvious if not uncontroversial: enable all compiler warnings, use lint, use assertions, and don't wait until you have a bug to step through your code. Enough of these reasonable guidelines appear in the text to lull the reader into a false sense of security with the remainder of the work. What makes this book dangerous for new developers is the number of points that are either marginal in value or just plain wrong. While it is impossible to give a comprehensive list in a brief review, here is a few: arguments against defensive programming, don't ship the debug version, avoid boolean arguments, and don't clean up code unless the clean-up is critical to the product's success. Finally, the recommendation "Make it fast, even if it is not guaranteed to be portable" flys in the face of one of the biggest success stories mentioned early in the book: getting Microsoft to build the Macintosh version directly from the newly created Windows source and sharing 80% of the code (with the accompanying savings) in the process. The truth is, a typical piece of software's life is significantly longer than the hardware it was written for and, therefore, will be ported. It is possible to write C code so it is reasonably portable, readable, and "modern in every way." In the book's defense, this wasn't strictly the purpose and scope of the book. Instead, the book was "Microsoft's techniques for developing bug-free C programs." In the early 1990's, Microsoft had to deliver software on slow processors with a segmented memory model. I got the sense that some of the recommendations in this book were due to those constraints (which are no longer present--even on Windows machines at this point). Until and unless MS Press updates the work to relax some of the recommendations obviously aimed at managing primative hardware and immature software I can't recommend this book. If, however, such a revision was made that included those changes and the additions of such notions as Refactoring (Fowler) this could be a valuable resource for C programmers or those who which to develop C coding standards.
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Writing Solid Code: Microsoft's Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs (Microsoft...
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