Sometimes the error message from the compiler will make sense, but if you are having trouble understanding it try searching online for it. You should see if you can find a concise explanation of what it means, and work out how to correct it. Remember this: there are many people before you who have struggled with exactly the same problems.

Sometimes there will be many compiler errors stemming from one source. Always go through compiler errors from first to last.

Sometimes the compiler will compile a program, but when you run it it will crash. Debugging C programs in this situation is hard. It can be an art far beyond the scope of this book.

For people feeling more confident a program called can be used to debug your C programs. This can be difficult and complicated to use, but it is also very powerful and can give you extremely valuable information and what went wrong and where. Information on how to use can be found .

On Mac the most recent versions of OS X don’t come with . Instead you can use which does largely the same job.