Once again, "he reminds us," wrote The Miami Herald, "that great writing is a timeless art."After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with twelve new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities--a remarkable cast of characters, primarily of the working class, proud and knowledgeable about the natural or mechanical world, their lives marked by a prized stereo or a magical sewing machine retrieved from a locked safe, boats and card games and casinos, grandparents and grandchildren and those in between, their experiences leading them to the ridiculous or the scarifying or the sublime; most of them striving for what's right and good, others tearing off in the opposite direction.

    Focus is on an in-depth analysis and exposition of not-so-obvious coding errors in the sample code provided. The theme is to answer the questions 'How couild I have automatically detected this bug' and 'How could I have prevented this bug'? Chapters include programmer attitudes, techniques and debugging methodology. A particularly revealing chapter is "Treacheries of the Trade", should be required reading for all C maniacs. The author has been a professional programmer for seventeen years and draws heavily (and candidly) on actual coding problems and practices based on years of experience at Microsoft.