Android™ How to Program, Second Edition

set and get Methods

A class’s private fields can be manipulated only by the class’s methods. So a client of an object—that is, any class that calls the object’s methods—calls the class’s public methods to manipulate the private fields of an object of the class. This is why the statements in method main (Fig. B.6) call the setCourseName, getCourseName and displayMessage methods on a GradeBook object. Classes often provide public methods to allow clients to set (i.e., assign values to) or get (i.e., obtain the values of) private instance variables. The names of these methods need not begin with set or get, but this naming convention is recommended and is convention for special Java software components called JavaBeans, which can simplify programming ...