* Rails is opinionated software. It makes the assumption that there is a "best" way to do things, and it's designed to encourage that way - and in some cases to discourage alternatives. If you learn "The Rails Way" you'll probably discover a tremendous increase in productivity. If you persist in bringing old habits from other languages to your Rails development, and trying to use patterns you learned elsewhere, you may have a less happy experience. * Don't Repeat Yourself: DRY is a principle of software development which states that "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." By not writing the same information over and over again, our code is more maintainable, more extensible, and less buggy. * Convention Over Configuration: Rails has opinions about the best way to do many things in a web application, and defaults to this set of conventions, rather than require that you specify every minutiae through endless configuration files.

* Xdebug's basic functions include the display of stack traces on error conditions, maximum nesting level protection and time tracking. * The debug information that Xdebug can provide includes the following: - stack and function traces in error messages with: - full parameter display for user defined functions - function name, file name and line indications - support for member functions - memory allocation - protection for infinite recursions * Xdebug also provides: - profiling information for PHP scripts - code coverage analysis - Capabilities to debug your scripts interactively with a debugger front-end.