Debugging with a Sledgehammer (or Google)

A debugging tip. Doesn't always work, but when it does it pays dividends. If you get an error in a program paste the whole error message into Google and do a search on it. I've done this a few times with various strange messages which the software manufacturer's site knows nothing about and it has come up trumps more often than not. If you are lucky you end up at a forum somewhere and find that someone else has had your problem and it has been sorted out. It has even been known to work with compilation errors, although I'm not sure I should suggest it to my first year Java class....