Hands on Debugging in C and C++

Course Curriculum

Chapter 1: Introduction

Lecture 1: Introduction to Debugging

Lecture 2: A Working Example in GDB

Lecture 3: Course Objectives

Lecture 4: A story about the first bug

Lecture 5: Write your code neatly!

Lecture 6: GDB for D, Objective-C, OpenCL, Rust, etc?

Lecture 7: Resources

Chapter 2: Setup

Lecture 1: GDB (linux), LLDB (Mac), or Visual Studio (Windows)

Lecture 2: GDB on Linux (and lldb)

Lecture 3: GDB on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Lecture 4: LLDB on Mac

Chapter 3: Utilizing the Compiler as a Debugger – Respecting the Compiler

Lecture 1: Compile-time vs Run-time debugging

Lecture 2: Compiler Errors

Lecture 3: Compilers cannot read our minds

Lecture 4: Treat Compiler Warnings (-Wall, -Werror, and -Wconversion) as Errors (Use C++ {}

Lecture 5: Trick: Leveraging multiple compilers

Lecture 6: Tip: Write your code neatly

Chapter 4: Your First Debugging Technique – printf

Lecture 1: A Debugging Exercise (swap_buggy)

Lecture 2: printf debugging (std::cout, console.log)

Lecture 3: printf debugging (one more look) with DEBUG

Chapter 5: Using a Debugger

Lecture 1: GNU Debugger (GDB) – The Basics

Lecture 2: Why We Compile with Debug Symbols (-g)

Lecture 3: Printing Values and Listing Source Code

Lecture 4: Figuring out a Variable Type with 'whatis'

Lecture 5: Breakpoints (br and info) and Continue (c)

Chapter 6: GDB Text User Interface (TUI)

Lecture 1: GDB the Text User Interface (TUI)

Lecture 2: Redirecting output from GDB (to another file or terminal)

Lecture 3: Conditional Breakpoints

Lecture 4: More ways to continue and step through code (advance, and until)

Lecture 5: Watching (watch and rwatch) Variables

Lecture 6: Breakpoints Part 2 (enable, disable, and save breakpoint)

Lecture 7: Display and undisplay

Lecture 8: Getting help in GDB (info)

Chapter 7: Foundations of Processes and Debugging Common Memory Errors

Lecture 1: The Program Stack

Lecture 2: What is a Call Stack?

Lecture 3: Navigating the Call Stack with Backtrace

Lecture 4: [Concept] Understanding common errors – the segmentation fault

Lecture 5: [Exercise] Segmentation Fault

Lecture 6: [Solution] Segmentation Fault

Lecture 7: [Concept] Understanding common errors – the memory leak

Lecture 8: Understanding common errors – Stack Overflow

Lecture 9: [Exercise] Memory Leak (And the address sanitizer)

Lecture 10: [Solution] Memory Leak (And the address sanitizer)

Chapter 8: Debugging Techniques

Lecture 1: [Theory] Delta Debugging Technique

Lecture 2: Bug prevention – assert statement and static_assert

Lecture 3: Investigating Code by Calling functions within GDB

Lecture 4: Attaching the Debugger to a Running Process

Lecture 5: Core dumped — and how to look at those files.

Lecture 6: Core dumped — gcore for a running process

Lecture 7: Examining Memory in GDB (and also hex)

Chapter 9: GDB Commands, Scripts, and Workflow

Lecture 1: Breakpoints and commands — save time!

Lecture 2: define your own commands

Lecture 3: gdb scripts

Lecture 4: Shell commands within GDB (shell, make, and pipe)

Lecture 5: Edit source files within GDB

Chapter 10: GDB and Python Basics

Lecture 1: Check and Setup GDB with Python (from source)

Lecture 2: Using Python within GDB

Chapter 11: Experimental and Advanced Debugging Techniques

Lecture 1: Set a variable value

Lecture 2: Reverse Debugging

Lecture 3: Debugging Multi-Threaded Programs

Lecture 4: Bookmarks and Checkpoints (Save a snapshot of your program)

Chapter 12: More Interactive Debugging

Lecture 1: GDB Debug Cycle — Rerunning and reviewing software

Chapter 13: Other useful Debugging Tools

Lecture 1: DDD – Data Display Debugger

Lecture 2: strace and ltrace

Lecture 3: Installing and Using valgrind 3.19 (pronounced val-grinn)

Lecture 4: Using Valgrind and GDB together to fix a segfault and memory leak

Lecture 5: cppcheck and Weffc++

Chapter 14: Going Further with GDB Extra Features

Lecture 1: Inspecting the Virtual Table for Inheritance (C++)

Chapter 15: Debugger Internals

Lecture 1: GDB Command Debug Levels

Chapter 16: Conclusion

Lecture 1: The Conclusion and Your Next Steps

Chapter 17: Other Languages

Lecture 1: DLang