It is more than just writing code. Programmers must also assess tradeoffs, choose among design alternatives, debug and test, improve performance, and maintain software written by themselves and others. At the same time, they must be concerned with issues like compatibility, robustness, and reliability, while meeting specifications.
It covers all these topics, and more. This book is full of practical advice and real-world examples in C, C++, Java, and a variety of special-purpose languages. It includes chapters on:
Debugging: finding bugs quickly and methodically
Testing: guaranteeing that software works correctly and reliably
Performance: making programs faster and more compact
Portability: ensuring that programs run everywhere without change
Design: balancing goals and constraints to decide which algorithms and data structures are best interfaces: using abstraction and information hiding to control the interactions between components
