Java, A Beginner's Guide, 5th Edition, 5th Edition

Using final

As powerful and useful as method overriding and inheritance are, sometimes you will want to prevent them. For example, you might have a class that encapsulates control of some hardware device. Further, this class might offer the user the ability to initialize the device, making use of private, proprietary information. In this case, you don’t want users of your class to be able to override the initialization method. Whatever the reason, in Java it is easy to prevent a method from being overridden or a class from being inherited by using the keyword final.

final Prevents Overriding

To prevent a method from being overridden, specify final as a modifier at the start of its declaration. Methods declared as final cannot be overridden. The ...