All new examples - that includes all examples marked with "lite-C" - are tested and work. Of course, errors and typos are always possible.
Some old examples that you can still find on some pages won't work, but they can be easily recognized because they don't make sense anyway. We've eliminated most of those nonsense "examples" from the manual, but from time to time I still find one.
An example can crash in your application if you're using it in a wrong way, or if some prerequisites are not fulfilled. However, I think as a game developer you're supposed to know how to deal with such a situation - just use the debugger to find out what crashes and why. If you find an obvious bug in an example, please notify us.