Though you've watched the Ricardo Signes How to use the Perl debugger talk twice (while I've not yet watched it once) I'd just like to throw a general word of caution that becoming an expert in using the Perl debugger may not be the best use of your time if your goal is to improve as a developer.

A few debugger quotes from some famous programmers:

• merlyn : I'm not into debugging. I can't recall ever invoking the Perl debugger except to try out snippets of code at a prompt ... But never for debugging. (Larry is also like this, I'm told.) merlyn again : If the code the client throws at you needs a debugger to trace it through, I'd argue it's not maintainable.
• Linus Torvalds : I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug ... Without a debugger you have to look at the level above sources. At the meaning of things. You have to understand what the program does. Not just that particular line. (See also: Linus Torvalds wikiquote).
• Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike : As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
• Rob Pike : Ken taught me that thinking before debugging is extremely important. If you dive into the bug, you tend to fix the local issue in the code, but if you think about the bug first, how the bug came to be, you often find and correct a higher-level problem in the code that will improve the design and prevent further bugs.
• Uncle Bob Martin : Using a debugger is a code smell. I consider debuggers to be a drug -- an addiction. Programmers can get into the horrible habit of depending on the debugger instead of on their brain. IMHO a debugger is a tool of last resort.
• John Graham-Cumming : For me, a debugger is (almost) always the wrong tool. And people who habitually use debuggers are making a big mistake, because they don't truly understand their code. I suspect that the same people who use debuggers all the time, are the same people who don't unit test their code.
• Daniel Lemire. The author of Python, Guido van Rossum, has been quoted as saying that he uses print statements for 90% of his debugging.
• Damian Conway urges you to add new test cases before you start debugging. After all, if the original test suite didn't report this bug, then that test suite was broken ... so fix the test suite first by adding tests that cause it to fail ... once the test suite is detecting the problem correctly, then you'll be able to tell when you've correctly fixed the actual bug, because the tests will once again fall silent.

See Also

• Rubber duck debugging (wikipedia)

• Re^3: Modern Perl 4th Edition (on Debuggers) (earlier version of points above)
• Re: perl compiler optimizer curiosity (Troubleshooting and Logging/Debugging References)

References Added Later

• Re: When my script doesn't work, I ... by talexb (2012) - surprised to hear someone's never used the Perl debugger

• How edit source code in perl debug mode by anonymonk (2024) - debuggers v editors v IDEs
• Re^3: How edit source code in perl debug mode by LanX (2024) - "I think I'm one of the main debugger experts here, and I hardly ever use it for debugging. My own code is better debugged with tests and conditional warns. Mainly because it's easily reproduced while interactive debugger sessions aren't."

• debugger watchpoint behavior by hexcoder (2024)

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