How do you read a Python traceback?

When Python hits an error it can't recover from, it doesn't just print the bad line — it prints the whole chain of function calls that led there, oldest call first. That's what "Traceback (most recent call last)" means: read top to bottom, and the deeper you go, the closer you get to where things actually broke.

Each frame in that chain names a file, a line number, and which function was running — then shows the exact source line at that point. The last frame is the one that matters most: it's where execution was standing when the error actually fired, not just where it was first triggered from.

The very last line of a traceback is the payoff: the exception type and its message, like ZeroDivisionError: division by zero. Most people jump straight there out of habit — which works for simple bugs, but skips the frames above it that explain how the program got into that state in the first place.