NO BUGS

PREFACE
As a rule, no one works in a vacuum. Writing this book was no exception to the rule. First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife, Shirley, both for her support in helping me write this book and in general for marrying me. I would also like to thank my two daughters, Winter and Tanya, for allowing me to work occasionally when I should have been playing with them.
This book is filled with tricks I have picked up over the years. Some I have figured out by myself while others are "stolen" from other developers. I owe particular thanks to Gordon Letwin and Mike McLaughlin, from whom I learned quite a few of these tricks, as well as to Andy Barnhart, Scott Quinn, and Pete Stewart.
I would also like to thank a number of other programmers with whom I have worked over the years—not just for ideas on writing bug-free code but for making me a better developer with their ideas, their feedback, and their friendship. If I tried to list all their names, I would forget someone, so I'd like to extend my general gratitude to the people I work with at Microsoft, those I used to work with at Harris & Paulson, and special thanks to those at DTS, my first company.
Special thanks also to Microsoft Corporation, the place where I learned about a testing system that really works (MS-DOS 5.0) and a wonderful environment for a software developer. As I reach each mountaintop, I find ever greater heights to scale before me.
A secret until now known to very few people is that my writing sucks. Fortunately, I have had individuals who have turned my raw text into something not only readable but, hopefully, enjoyable to read. The only reason you will be able to understand what is in this book is because Jean Zimmer turned a group of awkward sentences into flowing and understandable prose.
I showed the first draft of this manuscript to a number of people, and their comments helped me to change the book for the better. This group of people includes Joe Hayes, Marianne Jaeger, and Paul DiLascia.
Thanks to the people at Benchmark Productions and Addison-Wesley, without whom this book would not have been published. This group includes Chris Williams, Amy Pedersen, and Andrea Mulligan.
Finally, "domo arigato gozimasu" to the editors at Village Center (Japan), whose encouraging response to my No Bugs article in their magazine C Journal led me to write this book. Without their feedback on the article I would never have written this book. This includes Tak Nakamura and Sano Koji.
The ultimate test for any book is its ability to help you out you, the reader. I hope you find this book lets you write code that has fewer bugs. And more importantly, I hope this book makes writing bug-free code easier so you can spend more time on the fun parts of developing the next killer program.

Dave Thielen
Redmond, WA
March 1992

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