Introduction

Pain is a wonderful learning tool. It's nature's way of saying, "Don't do that!" If you are a programmer, you've had your share of pain. It usually occurs about 2:00 in the morning as you finally find that one last bug that has been tormenting you for the past two weeks.

The book is filled with buggy programs. This allows you to learn from the misfortunes of others. It contains bugs that I've found, bugs found by my friends and other programmers. Each program is a learning experience.

The programs presented here are designed to be as close to real world programs as possible. Each of the programs tries to accomplish a simple task or perform a simple C++ language feature. The bad news is that they don't work. The good news is that each is contained in a relatively short program, so you you don't have to muck through a 750,000 line program trying to discover the problem.

Some people believe that with the new compiler technology out there, that the compiler can catch most of these errors. Unfortunately, there are lots of errors that a compiler can't catch.

As an analogy, spell checkers are supposed to eliminate spelling errors. But can you spot the spelling error in this word: CAT ^[1]? Smelling cockers or a god think because other side this block would be fuel of arrows. (Hey, it passed the spell checker.)

So have fun spotting the errors. If you run into trouble, we've provided a number of hints to help you out (and a couple that are no help at all). There are also answers in the back of the book.

This is in contrast to real life, where there are no hints, and the answers aren't in the back of the book.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Chi Mui Wong. If she hadn't taken CS101 and learned that she's not a programmer, this book wouldn't exist (although it's her instructor who's responsible for the first broken "Hello World" in this book).

But the real dedication is to all those working programmers out there who labor day in and day out with complex, buggy, really rotten code and have to make sense of it. Good luck and have fun.