Review of Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code (Expert's Voice) (Hardcover)

Software Exorcism is a mind-dump by an experienced maintenance programmer. Bill Blunden lists all the horrendous coding techniques he's come across in commercial software, while offering detailed tips on debugging and optimizing code. The very useful code examples are written in C++, C or assembly language, mostly on an Intel platform.

The aim of the book is to help computer science and engineering students jump the chasm to corporate life by giving them the real-life vocabulary and practices that they can expect to meet over the first few years of their professional life. Much of what they will learn is to forget most of what they've been taught in college -- from terse variable names to an infatuation with recursive routines.

Amongst the challenges that Blunden expands upon are the realities of corporate and office politics. Here are all the gory details of the name-and-blame game, information hiding and "Sysyphean" tasks aimed at pressuring people to quit.

Ultimately, Blunden concludes, software engineering, as a career path, has become a "quaint anachronism" and programming is "strictly a short-term occupation". If he's right, then it's a pity that this book probably won't be seen by most CS students until they're ready to graduate after paying all that tuition.

Also recommended: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass

Product Description
<b>YOU HAVE TO OWN THIS BOOK!</b><p><p><i>Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code</i> takes an unflinching, no bulls$&# look at behavioral problems in the software engineering industry, shedding much-needed light on the social forces that make it difficult for programmers to do their job. Do you have a co-worker who perpetually writes bad code that <i>you</i> are forced to clean up? This is your book. While there are plenty of books on the market that cover debugging and short-term workarounds for bad code, Reverend Bill Blunden takes a revolutionary step beyond them by bringing our attention to the underlying illnesses that plague the software industry as a whole.<p>Further, <i>Software Exorcism</i> discusses tools and techniques for effective and aggressive debugging, gives optimization strategies that appeal to all levels of programmers, and presents in-depth treatments of technical issues with honest assessments that are not biased toward proprietary solutions. <p><b>Slashdot says . . .</b><p>"Leave it to a SubGenius preacher to take normally mundane subjects, like software maintenance, and expose the unholy conspiracy behind them. I think the following quote from the introduction sums up the tone of the book nicely: 'Rather than shield your eyes from the sordid realities of the software industry, I am going to dust off my old 8mm films and let you take a good look at the uncensored truth for yourself. You may want to keep a paper bag handy in case you get sick.<p><b>Readers are saying . . .</b><p><i>"Okay, I've worked with every moron in the book . . . was this [book] written about the guy who sits in the cube next to me?"</i><br>&emdash;Dan, VSLive 2003 Orlando attendee<p><i>"And I thought that I was the only person to ever actually throw my laptop across the room at a fellow coder."</i><br>&emdash;Anonymous, Microsoft PDC, Los Angeles<p>

About the Author
Reverend Bill Blunden is an alumnus of Cornell University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in physics. He also holds a master of science degree in operations research from Case Western Reserve. Reverend Blunden is an ordained SubGenius minister, and is currently at large in California's Bay Area.

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