Who Should Use This Book

If you were a detective and were investigating at the scene of a crime, you might interview the witnesses and ask them to describe what happened and who they saw. However, if there were no witnesses or these descriptions proved insufficient, you might consider collecting fingerprints and forensic evidence that could be examined for DNA to help solve the case. Often, software program failures divide into analogous categories: problems that can be solved with source-level debugging tools, and problems that require low-level debugging facilities, examination of core files, and knowledge of assembly language to diagnose and correct. MDB facilitates analysis of this second class of problems.

MDB is most useful when you are programming a complex low-level software system such as an operating system. The MDB debugging framework allows you to construct your own custom analysis tools to aid in the diagnosis of these low-level problems. MDB also provides a powerful set of built-in commands that enable you to analyze the state of your program at the assembly language level.