On the Zend Developer Zone today, Stefan Priebsch has written up an article introducing fellow developers to XDebug, a popular PHP debugging suite.

This article is the first installment of a five-part series of articles covering xdebug, a free and open source swiss army knife tool for PHP developers. xdebug is a PHP extension created by Derick Rethans, one of the PHP core developers. This week, we will show you how to install xdebug and introduce you to some of the basic features. In the subsequent parts of this article series, we will have a closer look at one of xdebug's main features, namely tracing, profiling, debugging, and code coverage.

In this first installment, he looks at installing the software (both on a unix-based system and on a Windows box) and how to turn it on to work with your web server. He also mentions some of the error output options including the "new and improved" var_dump call and the stack trace method to help you locate exactly where in the code the error's hidden.