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Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering Update: Coming Soon!

The updated edition of our Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering book is coming soon!


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.raywenderlich.com/326-advanced-apple-debugging-reverse-engineering-update-coming-soon

Isn’t debugging apps pointless nowadays? Doesn’t the Swift compiler figure out all the bugs beforehand?

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That is not true at all! There are cases when even experienced developers may struggle to find issues in apps. For instance, imagine you have developed some sophisticated concurrent algorithm using several design approaches that work with each other. There are cases when race conditions may occur in some specific conditions. You may rely on Swift compiler and Xcode, or at your analytical skills, but sometimes these approaches just do not work. Using debugging may help you not just solve a particular issue, but teach you something that you could miss. Human factor - do not forget about that, we usually may miss something (because of some external factors, like sickness or just bad mood).

Can’t wait for the updated book. It would be great if the book also dove deeply into Xcode Instruments.

Hey @tomn, thank you for the kind words. v2 will largely focus on cleanup and rewrites. Several chapters had to be completely rewritten thanks to this lovely little proposal swift-evolution/0160-objc-inference.md at main · apple/swift-evolution · GitHub where NSObject’s will not automatically use ObjC’s dynamic dispatch. Although, this is great news for Swift, a lot of breakpoint strategies are now obsolete in v1. That being said, I loosely anticipate v3 where I go crazy on new content and I plan to get that out in early Q2, 2018. I like your idea on Xcode Instruments and will definitely have a chapter(s?) on that.

And to any other potential readers, you get free updates for future versions of the book if you purchase the pdf/epub instead of the physical copy.

Another idea: Could you write more about the ways of how you can use logging in the app to aid debugging? There is this new unified logging system of Apple. How to effectively use those native solutions and where do their suite in iOS App development and debugging?

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