Handling exceptions
Efficiently incorporating errors and exceptions into your code is both a professional and personal benchmark in your programming journey. Before you start yelling “Why would I add errors when I’ve spent all this time trying to avoid them?!”, you should know that I don’t mean adding errors to break your existing code. It’s quite the opposite—including errors or exceptions and handling them appropriately when pieces of functionality are used incorrectly makes your code base stronger and less prone to crashes, not weaker.
Throwing exceptions
When we talk about adding errors, we refer to the process as exception throwing, which is an apt visual analogy. Throwing exceptions is part of something called defensive programming, which essentially means that you actively and consciously guard against improper or unplanned operations in your code. To mark those situations, you throw out an exception from a method that is then...