Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

“Who says you can’t bottle experience? Between these covers is a wealth of information: a clear, logical approach to finding and eliminating bugs. This is an absolute must-have book for anyone who develops, tests, or supports software for Microsoft Windows.”

-- Bob Wilton, Escalation Engineer, Critical Problem Resolution Team, Microsoft

“An excellent reference for both intermediate and advanced debuggers: highly practical, and filled with tricks and strategies. This book stands out from all other Win32 debugging literature, thanks to its in-depth examples—including resolving intricate problems like stack and heap corruptions.”

-- Kinshuman, Development Lead, Windows Core OS Division, Microsoft

The First In-Depth, Real-World, Insider’s Guide to Powerful Windows Debugging

For Windows developers, few tasks are more challenging than debugging—-or more crucial. Reliable and realistic information about Windows debugging has always been scarce. Now, with over 15 years of experience two of Microsoft’s system-level developers present a thorough and practical guide to Windows debugging ever written.

Mario Hewardt and Daniel Pravat cover debugging throughout the entire application lifecycle and show how to make the most of the tools currently available—-including Microsoft’s powerful native debuggers and third-party solutions.

To help you find real solutions fast, this book is organized around real-world debugging scenarios. Hewardt and Pravat use detailed code examples to illuminate the complex debugging challenges professional developers actually face. From core Windows operating system concepts to security, Windows® Vista™ and 64-bit debugging, they address emerging topics head-on—and nothing is ever oversimplified or glossed over!

This book enables you to

• Master today’s most powerful Windows debugging tools, including NTSD, CDB, WinDbg, KD, and ADPlus
• Debug code that wasn’t designed or written for easy debugging
• Understand debuggers “under the hood,” and manage symbols and sources efficiently
• Debug complex memory corruptions related to stacks and heaps
• Resolve complex security problems
• Debug across processes: identity tracking, RPC debugger extensions, and tracking IPCs with Ethereal
• Find and fix resource leaks, such as memory and handle leaks.
• Debug common thread synchronization problems
• Learn when and how to write custom debugger extensions
• Perform “postmortem debugging” using crash dumps and Windows Error Reporting
• Automate debugging with DebugDiag and the Analyze Debugger command

Whether you’re a system-level or application developer, Advanced Windows Debugging delivers the deep understanding of debugging that could save you weeks on your very next project.

Part I Overview

Chapter 1 Introduction to the Tools

Chapter 2 Introduction to the Debuggers

Chapter 3 Debugger Uncovered

Chapter 4 Managing Symbol and Source Files

Part II Applied Debugging

Chapter 5 Memory Corruptions Part I — Stacks

Chapter 6 Memory Corruptions Part I — Heaps

Chapter 7 Security

Chapter 8 Inter-process Communication

Chapter 9 Resource Leaks

Chapter 10 Synchronization

Part III Advanced Topics

Chapter 11 Writing Custom Debugger Extensions

Chapter 12 64-bit Debugging

Chapter 13 Postmortem Debugging

Chapter 14 Power Tools

Chapter 15 Windows Vista Fundamentals

Appendix A Application Verifier Test Settings

Average Customer Rating:

Simply The Best!	Customer Rating:
This is hands down the best book I have ever seen on the topic of Windows debugging. Whether you are chasing tricky synchronization issues, reverse engineering, or probing for security flaws, you'll do well to have this one handy. A bit pricey perhaps, but worth every penny.

BUY THIS BOOK!

Customer Rating:

Simple review here: If you're a developer working on Windows who sometimes needs to debug and diagnose complex / intermittent app failures, BUY THIS BOOK! There is simply NO other book that delves so deeply into how to debug using WinDBG / KD and it'll be some time until someone creates a book that supersedes this one. Very well written and containing information that would normally take YEARS to come by on your own, this book will save you MONTHS of hard work. BUY IT NOW!

A 'Must Have' for serious programmers	Customer Rating:
If you do nothing more than read the initial 4 chapters you will probably learn something. If you can get through Part II and Part III you will improve your knowledge of Windows programming and good general debugging techniques no matter how experienced you are. This is one every developer should have sitting by his PC.

The best book written on Windows Debugging	Customer Rating:
This book provides excellent coverage of the subject. I found it to be accurate and to contain the details I needed.

Unequaled

Customer Rating:

I have little to add to the effusive praise of previous reviewers. This is a one-of-kind book. An instant classic. Beware, however. As others have noted, this is definitely an _advanced_ book. If you're not comfortable with arcane command syntax, bits and bytes, and such this will be painful to incomprehensible for you. On the other hand, I dare say you will never be a true Master Debugger until you have a good grasp of this material. You would do well to start with Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications or the now-unavailable Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows. Both will give you an easier introduction to WinDbg. The latter, older volume has much more information on native code debugging than the newer version. As they also cover the Visual Studio debugger in detail, most developers need go no further than one of these. Note that WinDbg _can_ be used with SOS and ADPlus to do some pretty fancy .NET debugging that isn't possible with Visual Studio alone. For that matter, the .NET CLR on Windows is implemented using the same Windows API as any native application. I've seen WinDbg used to trace bugs through C# application code down to find that the defect was actually in the CLR or Windows itself. John Robbins (author of the previously mentioned books) states in Chapter 6 of the latest version that "in our consulting work at Wintellect, which as you know works on the toughest bugs, we use WinDBG nearly 70 percent of the time." Don't ignore this book just because you program in .NET! Watch out for the font used in the listings though. Not being a master myself, I've been stumped for quite a while because the letter 'l' looks like the number '1' in the font they use. (I've been assiduously following the examples line-by-line). I also recall being stumped because of an error or two in the text, though I admit I can't find them now. These as you can imagine could be a serious problem given the arcane and undocumented nature of quite a bit of the material. Just make sure you check the errata periodically. Ironically, the errata web page for the book is not functioning at the moment...