Exception Handling, Text I/O, and Recursion

One of the critical skills required of computer programmers is what to do when things go wrong. Things can go wrong in any number of ways, and you have already learned about a couple of techniques (most notably conditional if-else statements) that you can employ to handle problems. However, Java provides a powerful mechanism called Exception Handling that allows programmers to handle both serious errors and less serious exceptions that can occur during the running of a program.

This week, you will explore methods for taking care of problems that can arise during the run of a computer program via exception-handling. In previous weeks, you were introduced to Java techniques for handling input and output. This week, you will be introduced to additional methods for reading and writing text data to files.

In addition, you will investigate the concept of recursion (where a method calls itself) and how it can be used effectively for certain situations and calculations. Finally, you will begin working on Programming Project 2,

Students will:

·      Analyze the characteristics of loosely-coupled programs

·      Use exceptions to handle unexpected errors

·      Use Java I/O to process a stream of textual data