Xdebug or zend as a debugger

PHP
1

Hi there

I;m on the learning stage of PHP , but my backgound in C is looking for a debugger. At this moment I;m using eclipse PDT, and i’ve installed xdebug. I;m not sure how good is this because It doesn’t work as I expecting in my simple sample projects.

For example, i have the same problems as the guy from this movies has.

Can you tell me which is the best debugger at this moment. Which one a beginner is better to use? Do I have to use both of them?

2

XDebug is awesome. I generally turn off the “fancy HTML” features.

Debugging PHP scripts, for me, mostly consists of a lot of var_dump() statements. XDebug is useful for particularly evil problems (e.g. where displaying debug output will ruin the test).

I don’t use XAMMP. I use Portable App versions of Apache and MySQL with the ZIP file distribution of PHP. Makes migrating my apps and data to other machines easier.