So you generally avoid using IDEs because you don't yet know what's going on under the surface? ;) I've been on both sides of that particular fence. On the one

So you generally avoid using IDEs because you don't yet know what's going on under the surface? ;) I've been on both sides of that particular fence. On the one hand, learning to use a fancy development tool effectively takes time and effort, and that's time and effort that often can't be used to understand what's going on under the covers. And then you're stuck learning about the inner workings anyway when something fails to build with some kind of vague error message. But in the long run the automation provided by high-level development tools makes for more productive programming, and the time spent learning to use them is usually paid back handsomely. My advice would be to do a few projects using little more than command-line tools (and no project templates), but then don't get stuck in a rut and do take the time to learn how to automate things and generally make your life easier with higher-level tools. With debuggers in particular there are classes of bugs where logging (or worse, Response.Write/echo/puts debugging) is pretty ineffective: if an integer is being interpreted as a string where you expected a number, printing out the value in a log file doesn't give you much insight into what's going wrong.