Error Handling

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One topic that isn't currently in the curriculum that I'd really like to add is detecting, handling, reporting, and recovering from errors. This makes up is 10-30% of the code in real applications, but dealing with errors is almost omitted from textbook examples and tutorials for the sake of clarity (Tanenbaum's Minix book being a laudable exception). I have asked elsewhere for someone to write an entire book on the subject; if anyone wants to take a crack at an hour-long lecture, please get in touch.