Held: Wednesday, 17 September 2014

Back to Outline 11 - Some Subtleties: References and Automatic Boxing/Unboxing. On to Outline 13 - Exceptional Programming.

Summary

We explore debugging, particularly the use of Eclipse's Java debugger.

Related Pages

• Reading: Debugging in Eclipse
• Lab: Debugging in Eclipse
• EBoard 12 (Source 12) (HTML 12)

Overview

• Why use debuggers?
• Debuggers vs. print statements.
• Text or graphical UI?
• Debugging in Eclipse.

Administrivia

• Continue partners from yesterday.
• Once again, I'll try not to talk much today (after the preliminaries).

Reflections on Epilogues

Notes from Epilogues on HW 3

• Not all of you filled in the epilogues. Please take the time to do so. Evidence suggests that you learn better if you bookend your assignments: Think about the work in advance, do the work, reflect on it.
  • This approach can also help with more general skills, such as reading tasks and assessing workload.
• Each person should fill out his/her/zir own epilogue. The goal is to reflect personally, not as a group.
• Some interesting responses
  • "We did not predict all of the complexities."
    
    • Are there ways you might improve your skills in identifying complexities?
  • "Debugging was hard!"
    • We're working with the debugger today, which may help.
    • Evidence suggests that if you think more carefully about the problem before implementing, you'll have less debugging.
    • Generally budget the same amount of time for debugging as you spend on design and implementation.
  • "I did not read the assignment closely enough."
• Time spent: 5-10 hours
  • How do we make you more efficient while helping you learn, particularly since the best learning often happens when you hit obstacles?

Upcoming Work

• Daily lab writeup: http://bit.ly/207writeup
• A few of you have HW 4 left. Please try to get it done by 10am Thursday so that I can go over it in the review session.
• Peer Reviews on HW4: http://bit.ly/207-2014F-peer04
  • Reviewers to be assigned as soon as I get all of the assignments.
• HW 5 assigned.
  • Groups of three or four.
  • You may choose partners or you may ask me to assign partners.
• Readings for Friday
  • Exceptions in Java

Extra Credit Opportunities

Academic

• Convo TODAY: President Kington
• CS resume review session, Thursday, 4:30 pm.
• CS Table, Friday: User Tracking

Peer Support

• Men's soccer, Saturday at some time.

Miscellaneous

• Friends of Drake Library needs help setting up for their annual booksale on Thursday, October 2 (conveniently, the same night as Grinnell High School's homecoming parade). You can help a good cause and probably get a few free books, too.

Some Notes on Debuggers

• Amazingly, I don't have a lot to say about debuggers, other than that I think they're a good idea, but not a silver bullet.
• Oh, I'll mention that I prefer textual debuggers like gdb.
• And I don't recommend that you regularly debug byinserting print statements.

Lab

• Do the lab