A Field Guide to Software Bugs

Every bug you have ever shipped, drawn the way a Victorian naturalist drew beetles.

The Off-by-One Error has seven legs under a caption that says six. The Buffer Overflow has walked out of its own picture. The Stale Cache page is showing the wrong plate, and its caption suggests closing the book and opening it again.

A Field Guide to Software Bugs is a real field guide to sixty-four species of software bug, one to a page. Each has a hand-coloured plate, a Latin name, a conservation status and a short entry in the level voice of a naturalist who never admits that any of it is funny:

• The Heisenbug (Larva fugax). Status: DATA DEFICIENT. "Vanishes when looked at."
• Works on My Machine (Machina mea). Status: EXTINCT IN THE WILD. "In perfect health on the desk where it was written. Dies on the journey."
• The Friday Deploy (Veneris vespertinus). "A small, safe change, released at ten to five by someone with a train to catch."
• The Temporary Fix (Ephemera permanens). "Nothing in software lasts longer."

For the programmer: every habit described is true of the real bug, every line of advice is one you would give, and the notable sightings happened. The rocket lost to a 64-bit number in a 16-bit space. The Mars probe lost to a unit. The eleven lines of JavaScript whose removal stopped thousands of projects from building. Dates and figures are sourced at the back.

For the person buying a present for one: you do not need to get the jokes. They will. It is clean enough for the office, handsome enough to leave on a desk, and the pages that look broken are broken on purpose.

Inside:

• 64 species in eight orders, from the counting bugs to the ones people keep on purpose
• More than sixty full-colour plates in the manner of an antique book of insects
• A key for identifying your bug, a life list to tick off the ones you have met, and a blank plate for your own
• Pages that suffer the bug they describe: a deadlocked page, a page in dark mode, an index that is off by one
• A list of Known Issues, since a guide to bugs ought to contain some

A gift for software engineers, developers, testers, computer science students, and anyone who has ever said "It was working a minute ago."