Debugging

Debugging is one of the most important aspects of software development. Bugs are simply a fact of life for a software engineer. You can't avoid them, but you can get better at tracking them down and, most importantly, solving them quickly.

Even the best software engineers will write bugs from time to time. Having the right tools and knowing how to use them to solve a problem quickly is one of the most useful skills you can learn with any programming language.

When you start out writing Ruby, you will probably debug your application by simply writing puts statements everywhere, logging out the values of your variables to understand what's happening. This will become painful soon enough and you'll want to start using some more powerful tools and interacting with the code at runtime.

We're going to cover the basics of some of the most popular debugging solutions here, both from the command line and from the editor. By the end, you'll have a...