[adelaide.pm] Perl Debugger Talk - Thursday, 24 November 2011

[David Lloyd]

Time and Date: 24th November 2011 @ 6 PM

Introduction to the Perl Debugger

There will be a practical presentation of using the Perl debugger, covering:

Before debugging
A quick tutorial
Debugger commands
Help and quitting
Examining data
Listing code and searching
Motion
Actions, breakpoints and watchpoints
Shell and debug commands
Setting options
We will have a brief look at debugging a card game
Quickly by looking at a simplistic Golf card game that I wrote
Looking at the "klondike example game" (aka standard solitaire) that is part of the standard distribution of Games::Cards
We will quickly mention what we've missed out
The debugger is configurable to collapse (it is Unix/Perl) thus many options won't be discussed
The talk is geared more towards finding faults or investigating code than profiling
If your code uses XS natively or via another glue system such as SWIG and the external libraries fail, perhaps in the C/C++ code, debugging with 'gdb' is not covered

I gratefully acknowledge and recommend Richard Foley's "Perl Debugger Pocket Reference" published by O'Reilly (0596005032) from which much of the above outline is "borrowed".

The goal of the presentation is to get us familiar with the debugger to the extent where, instead of putting one (or more!) print or debug/trace level log statements we might feel comfortable enough to fire up the debugger and look at the problem with that perspective. The debugger, with its sometimes cryptic one word commands, can seem daunting but after seeing some of them in use hopefully we'll be inspired to try this out.

Location

The location will be announced in a follow up message.


Thanks,


DSL
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