Who Should Read This Book?

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I wrote this book for developers who are tired of spending late nights at work debugging and want to improve the quality of their code and their organizations. I also wrote this book for managers and team leaders who want to develop more efficient and effective teams.

From a technical perspective, the "ideal reader" is someone who has one to three years of experience using Microsoft Visual C++ and/or Microsoft Visual Basic. I also expect the reader to have been a member of a real-world development team and to have shipped at least one product. Although I don't care for the term, the software industry labels developers with this level of experience "intermediate developers."

Advanced developers will probably learn a great deal as well. I was very blessed to have a wonderful group of friends, my "Review Crew," critique the chapters before I submitted them to Microsoft Press. These engineers, who are listed in the Acknowledgments section of this book, are the people who taught me how to develop and debug. Indeed, they are some of the best developers in the business. I was extremely pleased that they all told me they had learned a lot from reading my book.

Note to Visual Basic Developers

If you flip through this book, you'll notice that I emphasize the Visual C++ debugger, C and C++, and assembly language. There are two reasons for this emphasis. First, C and C++ offer more opportunities than Visual Basic for developers to shoot themselves in the foot. Second, because the Visual Basic debugger can't debug native compiled binaries, you need to know the Visual C++ debugger to debug your Visual Basic applications. Even though on the basis of a cursory look you might think this book doesn't cover Visual Basic, rest assured that when it comes to real-world development with Visual Basic, you'll find that nearly the entire book applies to you. Debugging is debugging, regardless of the development environment.