Android™ How to Program, Second Edition

B.4. Instance Variables, set Methods and get Methods

In Appendix A, we declared all of an application’s variables in the application’s main method. Variables declared in the body of a particular method are known as local variables and can be used only in that method. When that method terminates, the values of its local variables are lost. Recall from Section 1.8 that an object has attributes that are carried with it as it’s used in a program. Such attributes exist before a method is called on an object, while the method is executing and after the method completes execution.

A class normally consists of one or more methods that manipulate the attributes that belong to a particular object of the class. Attributes are represented as variables in ...