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Asked: 2026-05-17T14:55:01+00:00

I prefer to have the rc error-code return style of error management. I agree

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I prefer to have the “rc” error-code return style of error management. I agree that this presents challenges that are better served by throw-catch, however, I still feel that I am not designing and implementing in a style that is clean and maintainable. So, I am looking for a good book that discusses the pattern and is not simply a reference book.

A bibliography of references would be fine too …

An excerpt from the answer below, “Practices of an Agile Programmer”, that I found especially striking:

**Keeping Your Balance**

• Determining who is responsible for handling an exception is part of design.
• Not all situations are exceptional.
• Report an exception that has meaning in the context of this code. A NullPointerException is pretty but just as useless as the null object described earlier.
• If the code writes a running debug log, issue a log message when an exception is caught or thrown; this will make tracking them down much easier.
• Checked exceptions can be onerous to work with. No one wants to call a method that throws thirty-one different checked exceptions. That’s a design error: fix it, don’t patch over it.
• Propagate what you can’t handle.
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  1. Editorial Team

    I have not found a book dedicated to exception handling, but there are some which deal with this topic at the length of a section or chapter.

    As a primer and for a language agnostic approach see [Martin, Ch. 7]. [McConnel, Ch. 8.4] also deals with exception handling on a very general basis. For addtionally good advices for the use of exceptions see [Subramaniam, Hunt, Ch. 36, 37]. I also found [Richter, Ch. 20] very useful although it is specific to .NET and C#. Nevertheless some sections are applicable to other languages, too.

    Recommendation: As an alternative approach to throwing exceptions and error-code return style of programming, do some research on the “Special Case Pattern” or “Null Object Pattern” in the WWW.

    • [Martin] Martin, C. R. (2008). Clean
      Code: A Handbook of Agile Software
      Craftsmanship. Prentice Hall
      International.
    • [McConnel] McConnel,
      S. (2004). Code Complete.
    • [Subramaniam, Hunt]
      Subramaniam, V., & Hunt, A. (2006).
      Practices of an Agile Developer.
      Pragmatic Programmers.
    • [Richter]
      Richter, J. (2010). CLR via C#.
      Microsoft Press.
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