Exception Handling Fundamentals

Exception handling is Java's mechanism for detecting, reporting, and recovering from runtime errors using five keywords: try, catch, finally, throw, and throws.

Checked exceptions are enforced at compile time and must be caught or declared, while unchecked exceptions extend RuntimeException and represent programming bugs that the compiler does not force you to handle.

throw is a statement that creates and raises an exception object at runtime, while throws is a method signature declaration that warns callers which checked exceptions the method might produce.

Error represents unrecoverable JVM-level problems like OutOfMemoryError that you should not catch, while Exception represents application-level problems like IOException that you can catch and handle gracefully.