On his blog, Justin has posted an article from David Sklar today - a look at PHP error reporting - conifguration, locating errors, and checking variable values as the script runs.
This article gives you some techniques for finding and fixing the problems in your programs. It covers three topics: how to get the PHP interpreter to report the errors that interest you, how to locate basic syntax errors in your program, How to check the values of variables as your program is running.
Whether you're a PHP newbie or a wizard, your programs are going to have bugs in them. Nobody's perfect.
The configuration section mentions the display_errors and log_errors options to help debug your scripts. There's also a bit describing what the different error types mean (parse, fatal, strict) and simple things to look for to handle them. He also suggests some other resources to look at to help with more detailed error reporting...