Programmer's Guide to Java™ Certification, A: A Comprehensive Primer, Second Edition

5.5. Stack-based Execution and Exception Propagation

An exception in Java is a signal that indicates the occurrence of some important or unexpected condition during execution. For example, a requested file cannot be found, or an array index is out of bounds, or a network link failed. Explicit checks in the code for such conditions can easily result in incomprehensible code. Java provides an exception handling mechanism for systematically dealing with such error conditions.

The exception mechanism is built around the throw-and-catch paradigm. To throw an exception is to signal that an unexpected error condition has occurred. To catch an exception is to take appropriate action to deal with the exception. An exception is caught by an exception handler ...