[themoops36]

Can you recommend anything to learn debugging the proper way (or maybe the article here is a good resource)?

I might be one of these print() people- usually when I hit bugs I read through the stack trace and can figure it out, but if it's more of an "unexpected result" I resort to print() so I know exactly what I'm doing. Would love to learn a more efficient way

[JackC]

For me the next step after print debugging was adding an `import pdb; pdb.set_trace()` shortcut to my editor (I use "pdb<tab>" as the shortcut, but whatever works.) Do that whenever you would add a print statement and re-run to resolve a confusing bug. It drops you into a REPL at that point in the code, and you can then print values and try running things. It basically just collapses a series of "add print statement and run" into a much tighter loop, which can save a ton of time depending how long it takes your program to throw the error and how many print statements it was going to take you to figure out what was wrong.

Key commands I use while in pdb: ? for help; n to run the next line; s to step into the next function call; w to see where I am in the stack; u and d to go up and down the stack; unt to run until a new line is reached (if you're stuck in a loop); interact to go to a normal python shell (if the pdb shell is confused by what you typed).

This won't replace print statements 100% of the time, because it might be simpler to print a bunch of logs to see where the problem is than to step through the program in the debugger; use it when you know where the problem probably is but not what it is.

[alexhutcheson]

Andreas Zeller’s Software Debugging course on Udacity is excellent and also free: https://www.udacity.com/course/software-debugging--cs259

[soVeryTired]

This seems to be a decent intro. It's focused on pycharm but the same functionality is available in VS Code and most other IDEs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtWxm12Eo0