Related pages

• Problem-Solving

Background

• This is one of the biggest parts of being a programmer.
• It is a very common weakness among weaker software engineers to simply fret when they hit a hard problem instead of knowing how to decompose it into smaller problems.
  • Source: C. had said this to me.

• Get a link to the YouTube video by Tom Francis in which he describes having trouble debugging something. What I was struck by was his description of his debugging process: just disabling code until the bug disappeared, and then using that to figure out what was causing the bug. (In this case the bug was that the player's character wouldn't respond to controls on a particular level.)

Books

• The Pragmatic Programmer
  • Chapter 18, 'Debugging'
  • Chapter 37, 'Solving Impossible Puzzles'

Articles

• 2010.05.11 - CSS-Tricks - Reduced Test Cases
  • A reduced test case is a demo/example page you create which reproduces the problem you are having with the least amount of code possible. Only the HTML needed to show the problem content. Only CSS that is related to that reduced HTML. Only the JavaScript related to the problem functionality at hand. Reduced test cases are the absolute, no doubt about it, number one way to troubleshoot bugs.
• 2014.09.03 - CodeUnion - Teaching Novice Programmers How to Debug Their Code