Console.log(); How to & Debugging javascript

Question

Ok so I hope this is a question that isn't to basic for you guys.

I know enough jQuery to get myself into trouble, meaning I can grab elements and do stuff with it, write my own little functions for interactivity and such. But then something doesn't go as expected, before I post questions to stackoverflow and get answers that make me slap myself in the forehead I would like to debug it myself and am sick of inserting alert(); into my code. In reading up on the subject there is mention of console.log();, console.info(); and the such but I can not find any resource that explains how to use these in real world scenarios for debugging.

Do any of you know of a good resource or tutorial (not afraid to read a book) that can explain how to use these functions for the layman. It seems that the tutorials and such I am finding are either way to advanced or just skim the surface and don't show you how to use them. I understand I can insert console.log(); and it will spit out information in the console for firebug or element inspector. But what if my hand baked function is doing something unexpected somewhere up the line, how do I find the problem as the browser parses the javascript.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I feel learning this will help me understand what is going on in my code, so I can stop staring at the screen going “Why isn't this working, it worked in the jsfiddle!”

Answer 1

console.log() just takes whatever you pass to it and writes it to a console's log window. If you pass in an array, you'll be able to inspect the array's contents. Pass in an object, you can examine the object's attributes/methods. pass in a string, it'll log the string. Basically it's "document.write" but can intelligently take apart its arguments and write them out elsewhere.

It's useful to outputting occasional debugging information, but not particularly useful if you have a massive amount of debugging output.

To watch as a script's executing, you'd use a debugger instead, which allows you step through the code line-by-line. console.log's used when you need to display what some variable's contents were for later inspection, but do not want to interrupt execution.