Various discussion about debugger Debuggers are a wasteful Timesink - http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=23476 The Power of Debuggers - http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000055.html And a lot of links - http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/10/are-ruby-debuggers-harmful I feel the same, most of the time rely on debugger is not that nice - http://iancartwright.com/blog/2009/11/ban-debugger.html Here are the types of debuggers we cover: CLI debuggers IDE debuggers Build you own debugger Heap dumps Historical debuggers Dynamic tracing Production debugging Takipi http://www.takipiblog.com/2013/12/03/java-debugger-the-definitive-list-of-tools/