Tools to help you
Most of the time, unless the issue at hand is immediately resolvable, you will need a tool or utility of some sort to help you determine what is going on with your issue. We've already discussed using logs, print
statements, and debuggers to help you resolve issues, but what do you do when the issue is with a web application or a call to a web service? There are plenty of ways to tackle those issues as well; let's take a look at a few.
Browser dev tools
All modern browsers now come with some flavor of development tools, or dev tools as they are commonly referred to. With dev tools, you can perform a variety of tasks, such as view the source of a page, debug and step through the code of a site, or watch network traffic to see what happens as the code executes, to name a few. Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, all have dev tools, but here we will be discussing Chrome's dev tools, as they are some of the easiest, most complete, and most intuitive to learn and use.
Note
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