I'm an undergrad TA for an introductory programming course, and I believe it is one of the most important skills that is not taught in the actual syllabus. Most every student runs into road blocks at some time. When I work with them, I try to work through a process of debugging. Even for me, it took me a number of years to have a rigorous concept of what debugging entails, and often still takes me some time before I decide to attack the issue in a systematic way, even if beginning the debugging process formally would be a much more efficient use of my time.

A number of years ago, I wrote http://the-whiteboard.github.io/coding/debugging/2016/03/26/...

> I’ll admit to being a bit hazy about the exact homework problems and lectures in intro to CS all those decades ago. I’ll even admit to it being in Pascal (the other choices were C or Fortran 77). I suspect the first homework problem was a “get familiar with writing in the IDE” and the second assignment was your typical “basic control structures.”

> If I could go back in time, I know what that third assignment would be. An intro to the debugger.

I mention it in the post, and I also really like the set of essays for How To Be A Programmer ( https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer ). I don't think its a coincidence that the first skill listed is Learn To Debug - https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer/blob/master/en...

> Debugging is the cornerstone of being a programmer. The first meaning of the verb "debug" is to remove errors, but the meaning that really matters is to see into the execution of a program by examining it. A programmer that cannot debug effectively is blind.