Learning to Program

Debugging

Debugging is what happens when your program is not working and you are trying to figure out how to fix it. In my experience, debugging can be one of the best or worst parts of programming. If you know how to use debugging tools and you know what to look for, debugging can actually be a lot of fun. However, if all you know is that your program is broken and you don’t know how to fix it, debugging can be frustrating and demoralizing.

My first attempts at debugging were frustrating and demoralizing. When I was starting to program Perl, the only way I knew to execute my code was by double-clicking the file I wanted to execute using Windows Explorer. Doing so opened a command prompt that stayed open only as long as the code was executing ...