Accelerated Mac OS X Core Dump Analysis Dmitry Vostokov

Summary: Worth the price

This book is definitely worth the price. It is costly, but still, worth the price. If you have a team of people who are descent to work with GDB but are not familiar with it yet, simply buy it. If you are an individual – this book is very pricy to afford. However, you can buy Safari Books Online subscription (~250$) and read the book itself, as well as many other books available there. So, make sure to decide whether it pays off. Of course this is an option only in case you don’t need the book at your bookshelf.

That’s about the price. As for the content, what you get here are practical examples (tutorial style) that show you how to deal with memory related issues in your code. Book (transcript) is very accurate. It covers most recent release of GDB at OS X. It is superbly up to date. Thanks to the tutorial style you will get your hands dirty through out the whole book. Samples are very well prepared and are ready to go just after downloading them.

One remark here. This book is not intended to entertain you with the text. What you get here are plain, bare, facts. You get list of steps to reproduce and very little explanation of what you do. Some engineering experience is required to fully benefit from it. As this book is a transcript form the training course you would probably benefit more by attending the course itself. On the other hand, if you know the basics of C, assembler and OS X you will find it very useful while studyingGDB and memory related issues in the code. It should pay off. When it comes to me, I haven’t bought it even though it’s a worthy stuff. I have found it accidentally at Safari Books and was really, really positively surprised with the content.

Product page: at Safari Books Online
Amazon (in Books): Accelerated Mac OS X Core Dump Analysis: Training Course Transcript and GDB Practice Exercises