C++ All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8

Working with Classes

In This Chapter

Understanding objects and classes and the difference between the two

Becoming familiar with member functions and variables in a class

Making parts of a class public, private, and protected

Using constructors and destructors

Building hierarchies of classes

Back in the early 1990s, the big buzzword in the computer world was object-oriented. For anything to sell, it had to be object-oriented, whatever that meant. Programming languages were object-oriented. Software applications were object-oriented. Computers were object-oriented. Refrigerators were object-oriented. What did that all mean? Nothing. It was simply a catchphrase that was cool at the time.

Those days are gone, and now we can explore what object-oriented really means and how you can use it to organize your C++ applications. In this chapter, we introduce object-oriented programming and show how you can do it in C++. Although people disagree on the strict definition of object-oriented, ...