Java By Comparison

What Have You Learned?

Handling exceptions is inevitable in any program you write. As you’ve seen in this chapter, it’s easy to get a subtle detail wrong with exceptions, such as forgetting to link exceptions into a cause chain or failing to close resources properly.

When you make such mistakes, your program will still compile. Java doesn’t force you to provide good messages for exceptions or to link them with each other. That’s a problem, because you might realize these issues only at a late stage, typically when your program has been deployed to production with real-world data. Then, you get bug reports with broken stack traces or meaningless error messages, which makes it very hard to track down their cause. So make your future working life ...