Summary

Logging and debugging are essential tools for any software project, and while we are learning this in Ruby, the principles are the same for any language.

Logging is one of those things that you don't truly appreciate until you really need it, and when you need it, you'll be glad you spent that extra little bit of time setting it up properly. As we've seen in this chapter, it really doesn't take much effort to dramatically improve your application's logging; even less if you set it up correctly from the very start of a project. With handy classes such as the Logger class, we can achieve very useful results with minimal work. We also dipped our toes into the world of debuggers. This is another area that is easily overlooked until you really need it. Once the complexity of an application grows to a certain level, printing out the values of variables is simply not going to cut it.

The ability to step through code execution and inspect the environment...