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Adventures in Debugging

RECOMMENDED READING (Not required for the course):
Perl Debugged
Peter Scott and Ed Wright
Addison Wesley
ISBN: 0-201-70054-9

SKILL LEVEL:

Novice to intermediate programmers eager to master the Perl debugger.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Between the mind-numbing sprinkling of debugging print statements and the maternal hand-holding of a visual Interactive Development Environment lies Perl's built-in debugger. Sometimes the debugger can reduce hours of painful trial-and-error to seconds of targeted exploration.

KEY OBJECTIVES:

You will learn:

	Basic and intermediate operation of the debugger Stepping through and tracing code Examining and displaying data Breakpoints, Actions, and Watchpoints
	The debugger as interactive sandbox
	Customizing the debugger Options Environment variables Initialization files
	GUI wrappers for the debugger: ddd, ptkdb
	Using ptkdb to interactively debug CGI programs

We'll illustrate these features using real-life examples of hard-to-trap bugs.

PREREQUISITES:
Any experience creating a shell script or computer program in any procedural language.