Who Should Read This Book

This book was written with both students and professional programmers in mind. Any student who has completed a course in computer programming and a course in data structures and algorithms should be able to understand and apply the material in this book. Professional programmers should find new ideas to make them more productive, along with new twists on old ideas they have been using for years.

The case studies were done in C++ and Java because they were the most popular programming languages in use when this book was written. I refer to other popular languages, particularly C and Fortran, when they are relevant to a particular topic. Since this book focuses on how to think about debugging, rather than on specific platforms, almost all of the material is relevant to all programming languages. If your primary language is not Java or C++, you should still be able to apply at least 90 percent of the material in this book.