C++ How to Program, 10/e

11.5 public, protected and private Inheritance

When deriving a class from a base class, the base class may be inherited through public, protected or private inheritance. We normally use public inheritance in this book. Use of protected inheritance is rare. Chapter 19 demonstrates private inheritance as an alternative to composition. Figure 11.16 summarizes for each type of inheritance the accessibility of base-class members in a derived class. The first column contains the base-class member access specifiers.

When deriving a class with public inheritance, public members of the base class become public members of the derived class, and protected members of the base class become protected members of the derived class. A base class’s private members ...