PHP newbie: I love it, but...

PHP is a very nice language. Been about a week reading O'Reilly & writing my first program. Making some fast progress. But, as I embellish my program, I am beginning to run into trouble. I am finding PHP to be extremely difficult to debug. There's a limit to embedding echo to check the program flow. Then, there are times when the browser shows absolutely nothing. Browser's Show Source Code lists next to nothing; I assume this is because the interpreter hung on a missing brace or something and outputted nothing! Until I become good at spotting my errors, I've got to find a debugging tool. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. Jean