Rating: 
Summary: Good, but could be even better
Review: When I first heard John Robbins was writing a book on Win32 debugging, I was delighted. I've been a fan of his MSJ Bugslayer articles since the beginning, and John's debugging knowledge, displayed in those articles, has helped me tremendously.However, for someone who has read all his MSJ work, this book is a bit of a disappointment. The reason is that the second part of the book is a collection of his (slightly-rewritten) MSJ articles, with almost no new content added as far as I can see. The first part of the book, however, is worth every dollar, as other reviewers have already mentioned, even though I was missing coverage of the WinDbg debugger, and MS tools such as userdump. Maybe in a second edition? To summarize, I suspect this book to be a 5-star for anyone who is fairly new to debugging and has not read John's MSJ columns. For others, who have been exposed to his columns, and have some experience, I'd rate this book 3-stars.
Rating: 
Summary: must have for a "real" developer
Review: You deliver a product. Soon an e-mail arrives - its crashed. "The register are .., the stack (and values) is .., the process address space is partitioned as follows (with values) .., the OS is ...". Now get real !! This book will give you the full info on how to get all that info from a crash (ie. to **write your own "core" dump**), and the user can send it to you - then you can hopefully backtrack to its origin. It gives you all the necessary info on assembly language (the book is worth getting just for this), but also the deep knowledge needed to track down almost any bugs - this is because it **actually shows you how to write a debugger**, and this imparts to you the "deep" info you need to know. Normal debugger usage is covered, but I regard this as trivial compared to the rest of the book. Compared to McKay's book, it is much deeper and goes into the "dirty stuff" that a "real" application programmer would need. An earlier review stated "why would anyone want to know how debuggers work"; all I can say is that anyone who thinks like this should not get this book (and should not be coding either). Oh yes, I am sorry to say I am also not going to give any petty criticism about something missing off the CD. But I will say that .COD files should have been mentioned. You can get these by setting the listing option on the VC++ project/options/C++ tab to source/assembly/machine_code - these are indispensable (with or without a .PDB - look at them and you will know why), but this is forgivable considering how good this book is. Get McKays book as well - it is still a very good book but the focus is at a higher level.
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