It has been said that programming is simply the art of debugging an empty file. While this is a bit of a narrow minded view of things, the fact is that debugging is hugely important to any serious programming. There are a lot of different ways to debug programs, ranging from writing logs to blinking a light to simply inspecting the contents of memory on a crashed system. However, the debugger is one of the most powerful tools for debugging, as you might expect, since it allows deep inspection and modification of a running program without having to anticipate your debugging needs in advance. Although lldb, the new debugger from the LLVM project, is quickly gaining functionality, the gold standard for debugging Cocoa apps is still gdb. Today I'm going to discuss how to use gdb and various tips and tricks for getting the most out of it, a topic suggested by Luis de la Rosa.