Welcome to the second installment of our five-part series of articles on xdebug, the PHP developer's swiss army knife extension. The installation of xdebug and its basic features were covered last week. This week, we will explore the tracing feature of xdebug.

He details what tracing is and how it's helpful (no more repetitive var_dumps!) in finding issues in your code. He shows how to set up a trace log, add the code to your application to pass debugging information off to the log and how to add additional information to the log to make narrowing down the error even easier.