a nice book, and recommendations regarding same

_Advanced Debugging_ - Mario Hewardt, Daniel Pravat

I love it. With any sufficiently technical topic i have to work my way through studying, there's a number of phases for me, and i assume for other people.

1. have no idea that the idea/technique exists/is usefull.
2. hear what it's for, and meet people who have near magical regard for what the technology is for and what it takes to understand it
3. read blog posts and books that reinforce that this technology is extremely difficult and magical, and omg you just dont understand how hard it is.
4. finally finding the easy to read, helpfull, encouraging book that those people actually learned from and worked their way through before they decided to scare other people with it.

This is all true! At least I think. When I was 16 and i first learned C (i'd been writing games in qbasic or writing games on my ti calculator before that), people kept saying "it's so complicated! It's advanced!" and they held a near magical regard of c, and whenever they spoke of it they'd imbue their regard with the implication that not all the intrepid explorers who attempt to conquer the mighty pointer and the difficult wishy/washy type system, manual allocation/deallocation of memory, etc could successfully wend there way through to a basic understanding of the language. Now in fact, this could not be further from the truth.

#include < stdio >

int main(void) {
   printf("Hi mom!");
   return 0;
}

Now, was that really hard? No. And the time spent scaring people could've more profitably been spent explaining what each line there means. That would've been a much nicer approach. Not at all magical. And for almost everything usefull i've learned since 16 (at present i'm 16 in base 24) there's been that air of magic from someone somewhere on the internet. The authors of this book understand what i'm talking about, and in the first four pages ensure you that their goal is to rip all the magic out of the thing, like prometheus bringing fire to the knuckleheads. This knucklehead is quite glad and recommends the nice mr prometheus' book to anyone she meets who isnt bored silly by computers.