Today we celebrate #DennisRitchieDay ahem excuse me, Dennis Ritchie Day, in memory of a computer programmer who... Oh, man his stuff is in your computer, in your phone, Dennis Ritchie's stuff is everywhere. Today's a good day for a report on a computer-y book. I wish I had one more appropriate in the hopper, but you go with what you have and what I have today is: Why Programs Fail. It's a textbook for software engineers in test. I guess it covers the ground pretty well, though I'm maybe not the best person to ask. I'm not a testing expert; at the same time, I know enough about testing such that I might not notice "gaps" in a book like this. But I did learn some things. I didn't know about delta debugging, a general technique for reducing a big hairy test case down to something smaller. That sounds like it could come in pretty handy. And I learned a bit about some static analysis techniques, though it was harder to imagine how they'd be useful; at least maybe now I'd be able to follow a conversation about some static analysis methods a little further before I got lost.