Fatal Defect : Chasing Killer Computer Bugs

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Reviews
Amazon.com
In Fatal Defects: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs, Ivars Peterson describes dozens and dozens of hoary computer bugs and gives biographical sketches of the bug detectives who located and fixed them. This book, which reads like a novel, is both entertaining and informative. Many of the bugs that Peterson discusses are not in computer programs per se but in the human systems that run and operate the computers. Very often the operator fails to understand what the computer program requires as input and types in an incorrect command. The computer then executes the command, with potentially disastrous results. Fatal Defects has important lessons for both those who design computers and those who use them.

Book Description
"The book is both amusing and a quite serious argument for never assuming computers are flawless."

-- San Diego Union-Tribune

An airplane crashes, killing eighty-seven passengers. A cancer patient receives a fatal dose of radiation from a machine designed to be foolproof. The ATMs at a New York bank debit customers twice their actual withdrawals, resulting in a loss of millions of dollars. In every case, the culprit was a computer bug, a software error or design defect that may escape detection until it erupts into the real world with sometimes catastrophic results.

This arresting and at times terrifying book tells us just how prevalent these defects are and how they are multiplying as computers become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in our daily lives. It is also a riveting portrait of the men and women who find and "exterminate" those bugs, whether they occur in pocket calculators or nuclear reactors.

Fatal Defect reveals what you should know about the computers in our lives. Read it before you buy a computer, use a cash machine, or book an airplane flight. Then pray that one of its real-life heroes was on the job.

"Peterson's book is an entertaining introduction to the problems of creating reliable computer systems."

-- Christian Science Monitor

Synopsis
A well-reasoned and researched account of how the lurching progress of software development and the forces of competition in business have shaped the computer industry today. Peterson explains why we'll never be able to debug our software completely or forestall all possible computer failures--leaving us vulnerable to mistakes that are annoying at best and fatal at worst. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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