Fairly New to IDEs - What Should I Explore in Komodo?

Discussions
1

Other than a class in BASIC in high school in the 1970s, a course in FORTRAN in the early 1980s, and a class in VAX 11/780 Assembler, I’m self taught. I went from the '80s until about 2001 without programming, then taught myself several languages (mostly Perl and Java) and ran my own business based on my software for 8 years or so. Now I’m using Python and Java and teaching myself C++.

When I started, in 2001, I used Kate, on Linux. It’s a text editor with a pane at the bottom for the command line. For most debugging, I used print statements and exit() or whatever terminated the program. I had to either produce useable data for clients or not get paid, so I didn’t have much time to explore different debugging methods or different IDE features. I know they could save me a LOT of time, but often I was on a deadline and just had to get that stage done quickly.

Toward the end of that time, I started using Eclipse on the recommendation of a friend. The one “IDE feature” (as opposed to just a text editor feature) I used much was refactoring. I did launch some programs from the IDE, but, for me, other than tabbing to the window with the terminal, I didn’t see much benefit in running from the IDE than from the terminal.

I just downloaded Komodo IDE 9.0 and I’m not sure if I’ll need the IDE or if the text editor is enough. Now that I have time, I’d like to learn more about using an IDE and what benefits it has.

For someone who’s been writing his own code for a while, but has almost no experience with an IDE, what features would you recommend are good to explore first? Anything that saves time is great, anything easy and quick to learn is good, too - but anything that is powerful will, of course, be a big help.

So without having any formal training, what should I start learning in Komodo IDE first?

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When I got the IDE version I start learning more about debugging and breakpoints (in PHP). Next I moved to HTTP Inspector and started learning how it works and what I could do with that. Then I started learning Python and again - Debugging. Now I’m learning Ruby and of course I try to debug it as much as I can. Komodo gives you a very powerful tools to write, debug and test your code. Next in my list is unit tests, I want to see what they can do and how can they help me in code debugging. Also I recommend to learn Code Profiler feature in Komodo to see how fast your code. You can find some slow methods and try to rewrite them to make them more faster.

3

A lot of the major features have been outlined in our screencasts section:

http://komodoide.com/screencasts/

We’ll be adding more blogs and screencasts outlining new features in the weeks to come, so be sure to keep an eye on our blog :slight_smile:

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Thanks! Looking into it all now. (I’m tied up the next few days with a ballroom dance competition and, around here, that’s priority #1!) I’ll be doing more this upcoming week. I’m looking forward to learning a few new things and finding ways to make my programming time and my programs more efficient.