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Effective Searchers look at what they are trying to find, pick out the important parts (if it's an error message, the generic portion of the message, not the specific-to-the-instance portion), and start looking, refining as they go.

To become an Effective Searcher does take some practice, but there is no better time than the present to start. Learn your favorite search engine's advanced features. For example, with Google I can search just on apache.org by adding site:apache.org to my search. Quoting the text of what you want to find will also tend to push references of it higher. Other tricks for Google in specific are available here , and at Google's own help site. Here's the help for DDG .

A drawback to using search engines, though, is that since they try to index everything , you can get a lot of results that are other people asking more-or-less the same question you are trying to find the answer to. That's great if an answer was posted, but when the responses are a lot of "me too"-types, it can be frustrating.

Part of becoming an Effective Searcher is learning to identify authority in resources found: "I had a paper to write several years ago on comparing AMD’s x86-64 architecture and Intel’s IA32 architecture for the companies’ CPUs. Sources like Tom’s Hardware Guide were helpful to see real-world comparisons between the competing products, but the true sources of authority on the products were AMD and Intel themselves. I printed large chunks of the manufacturer’s technical documentation to backup conclusions I made in my paper... Authority of sources isn’t assured by just one factor – author, publisher, host, length, etc – but rather by directly linking to the data used to produce the conclusions made by that source. No resource stands on its own as an authority on any topic. In order to establish credibility, any resouce must cite where their data came from – either through some kind of bibliography in the case of a paper, or experimental results, or that the resource is maintained by the people who designed and built what they’re writing about... The means of determining authority needs to come down to the following factors: 1) is the article written in an intelligent form? 2) are the sources cited of an authoritative nature? 3) has the author written anything previously that can be considered authoritative? and 4) would someone who is a known expert in the field (perhaps a professor of the topic) agree that the source is not some crackpot?"

Another component in becoming and Effective Searcher is to learn the skill of skimming for important details - and ignoring everything else. If you don't, you'll end up like the person described in this XKCD comic !

Lastly, to become an Effective Searcher, don't be afraid to ask for help: there is likely someone sitting near you or available via instant message who can help you out, and would be happy to if you only ask them.

Debugging tools

Linux typically has several useful debugging tools available out of the box. These include gdb (for the advanced user), strace , ps , lsof , netstat , iostat , uptime , and top . Many others exist as well, but these are the most-commonly utilized.

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Source:  OpenStax, Debugging and supporting software systems. OpenStax CNX. Aug 29, 2011 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11350/1.2
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