Author: sp

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A few weeks ago I read some Reverse Engineering related blog which I cant remember right now and my Google-Fu is failing me too or I would link to it. Anyway, in one of the comments on that blog, the book Dumps, Bugs and Debugging Forensics - The Adventures of Dr Debugalov (Amazon) was mentioned. Since the book title and its cover amused me a lot and I cant spend all of my money on hookers and blow I quickly grabbed a few Benjamins from my money bin and bought the book without checking out what it is actually about.

Some days later it arrived and I was surprised. The book is actually a comic book. It is a compilation of the comics you can find here. As you can see, the comics are not especially well-drawn and theyre nearly completely unfunny to boot. OK, four or five of the comics in the book are actually funny. The other 40 or so are not. The problem is obvious. There are only so many good jokes you can make about debugging (and to be honest, I debug a lot of stuff and I know very few good jokes about debugging). About four years and 100 blog entries ago, I complained about the ridiculous puns in the book C++ Coding Standards. The Dr Debugalov book suffers from exactly the same problem. Except that the Dr Debugalov book has (nearly) no content except for the puns in comic form. This magnifies the problem to the point where its getting painful.

Talking about ridiculous puns. The pages of the book do not just contain comics. Every single page also features a more or less famous quote that has been reworked (by replacing or inserting words) to turn it into a quote about debugging. After reading approximately 20 of these so called bugtations I wanted to shoot myself.

So yeah, what to recommend. You should probably buy the book, rip off the cover (which is really cute), frame it and hang it onto the wall of your little cog-in-the-machine cubicle or wherever you are working. The rest of the book can quickly be discarded.