Throwing and catching exceptions in functions

In Chapter 3, Controlling Flow, Converting Types, and Handling Exceptions, you were introduced to exceptions and how to use a try-catch statement to handle them. But you should only catch and handle an exception if you have enough information to mitigate the issue. If you do not, then you should allow the exception to pass up through the call stack to a higher level.

Understanding usage errors and execution errors

Usage errors are when a programmer misuses a function, typically by passing invalid values as parameters. They could be avoided by that programmer changing their code to pass valid values. When some programmers first learn C# and .NET, they sometimes think exceptions can always be avoided because they assume all errors are usage errors. Usage errors should all be fixed before production runtime.

Execution errors are when something happens at runtime that cannot be fixed by writing “better” code. Execution...