Chapter 17. Debugging and Optimization

Bloody instructions which, being learned, return to plague the inventor.

—Shakespeare, on debugging

The hardest part of a program is not the design and writing, but the debugging phase. It is here that you find out how your program really works (instead of how you think it works).

As programs grow larger and larger, finding bugs becomes more and more difficult. Also, the cost of errors is growing. Software bugs and poor design decisions have cost people billions of dollars the last few years alone. In this chapter we'll go through techniques you can use to find and eliminate bugs.